On May 22, 2010 Martin Gardner, an American mathematics and science writer, died at the age of 95. I didn’t know his name until I heard his death from several science blogs and tweets, looks like I’ve missed a lot.
When I learnt that he run a very successful corner in Scientific American for many years and readers requested his return for many years after his quit, I realized that I may have heard about this guy. What I remembered is Douglas Hofstadter‘s book “Metamagical Themas“. He explains the name of the book in the introduction section; it is actually the name of the corner he wrote for a magazine from which the book’s articles are compiled. The magazine asked him to prepare a corner to replace the current one, and he found the task very very hard as the current corner was a very successful one. So he somehow wanted to keep the name; as an anagram of the old corner’s name. Old corner was named “Mathematical Games”. This is all that I remember, since I read that book more than 10 years ago I don’t remember other details.
And yes, that hard-to-be-replaced, beloved author of the Mathematical Games corner turned out to be Martin Gardner. I’ll definitely buy and read some of his 70 books.
Here is a great quote from him that I heard today in Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast.
“Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals – the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.” Martin Gardner
