(Here are a dozen quality card magic effects that can be p...)
Here are a dozen quality card magic effects that can be performed with an unprepared, borrowed deck at a moment’s notice. While not all self-working, most of these miracles rely on just one or two sleights. Some require a setup.
(Famed puzzle expert explains the math behind a multitude ...)
Famed puzzle expert explains the math behind a multitude of mystifying tricks: card tricks, stage "mind-reading," coin and match tricks, counting out games, geometric dissections, etc. Probability, sets, the theory of numbers clearly explained. Also, more than 400 tricks, guaranteed to work, that you can do.
(Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener is a book that through ...)
Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener is a book that through six reprints has remained a dazzling tour de force, as unexpected, and idiosyncratic as Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, Gardner's friend, and successor at Scientific American.
(Parapsychology texts contain many references to Czechoslo...)
Parapsychology texts contain many references to Czechoslovakian clairvoyant Pavel Stepanek. Stepanek's tested "ESP" success rate of over 60% caused the 1970 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records to proclaim him "the best clairvoyant ever tested."
(A new critical assessment of Mary Baker Eddy and the inte...)
A new critical assessment of Mary Baker Eddy and the international movement she spawned is long overdue. Of the hundreds of books written about Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science, almost all have been by believers. With the notable exception of Mark Twain's Christian Science, the small number penned by skeptics have long since gone out of print.
(Over a period of 25 years as author of the Mathematical G...)
Over a period of 25 years as author of the Mathematical Games column for Scientific American, Martin Gardner devoted a column every six months or so to short math problems or puzzles.
(Martin Gardner, one of America's most acclaimed science w...)
Martin Gardner, one of America's most acclaimed science writers, has here compiled the first complete history of a growing, modern religious cult. Gardner traces the cult's beginnings back to its "bible," The Urantia Book, a book supposedly revealed solely by celestial beings to correct the flaws in the traditional Bible.
The Universe in a Handkerchief: Lewis Carroll’s Mathematical Recreations, Games, Puzzles, and Word Plays
(This book contains scores of intriguing puzzles and parad...)
This book contains scores of intriguing puzzles and paradoxes from Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, whose interests ranged from inventing new games like Arithmetical Croquet to important problems in symbolic logic and propositional calculus.
Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?: Discourses on Godel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics
(In this new book, Gardner explores startling scientific c...)
In this new book, Gardner explores startling scientific concepts, such as the possibility of multiple universes and the theory that time can go backwards.
(Finally collected in one volume, Martin Gardner's immense...)
Finally collected in one volume, Martin Gardner's immensely popular short puzzles; along with a few new ones from the master. For more than twenty-five years, Martin Gardner was Scientific American's renowned provocateur of popular math.
Jinn from Hyperspace: And Other Scribblings - Both Serious and Whimsical: And Other Scribblings - Both Serious and Whimsical
(For over fifty years Martin Gardner has been delighting r...)
For over fifty years Martin Gardner has been delighting readers with elegant, witty, and highly intelligent writing on an amazing array of topics. Best known for his works on popular science and mathematics, and as an incisive skeptical commentator on the paranormal, Gardner is also an accomplished writer of children's literature, a novelist, and a prolific essayist on religion, philosophy, and other issues.
When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations About This and That
(Best known as the longtime writer of the Mathematical Gam...)
Best known as the longtime writer of the Mathematical Games column for Scientific American - which introduced generations of readers to the joys of recreational mathematics - Martin Gardner has for decades pursued a parallel career as a devastatingly effective debunker of what he once famously dubbed "fads and fallacies in the name of science."
(A true pioneer in the field of recreational mathematics, ...)
A true pioneer in the field of recreational mathematics, Martin Gardner has been wrangling words for decades, and his latest opus is nothing short of extraordinary. From amazing anagrams and silly spoonerisms to alpha magic squares and cryptarithms, this mind-bending compendium is chock-full of whimsical forms of wordplay that are sure to have sesquipedalian scholars and limber-minded logophiles racking their brains in delight.
Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and science writer who had a long-running column on mathematical recreations in Scientific American. Gardner also wrote fiction, poetry, literary and film criticism, as well as puzzle books. He was also one of the most well-known creators of mathematical puzzles. He was a leading voice in refuting pseudoscientific theories, from extrasensory perception to flying saucers.
Background
Martin Gardner was born on October 21, 1914, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the United States, to James Henry Gardner and Willie Wilkerson Spiers. His father was a prominent petroleum geologist, and his mother was a Montessori-trained teacher. Martina was the eldest of three children. Later, his father started an oil company.
Education
As a boy, Martin liked magic tricks, chess, science, and collecting mechanical puzzles. Unbeknownst to his mother at the time, he learned to read by looking at the words on the page as she read him L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Gardner became fascinated with mathematics in high school when he took Pauline Baker's geometry course. She communicated a love for the subject that he readily absorbed. Gardner also had other academic interests. In 1932 he went to the University of Chicago to study physics but instead majored in philosophy, graduating in 1936.
Martin's first publication was a magic trick for the Sphinx in May 1930. He was fifteen years old and went on to publish for a further 80 years, in a bewildering breadth of fields. Most of Gardner's early writing had little to do with philosophy or mathematics. Before World War II, he worked as a reporter for the Tulsa Tribune.
After serving in the United States Navy during the second world war, Gardner returned briefly to Chicago for graduate studies in philosophy but got distracted by writing fiction. He sold about a dozen short stories to Esquire and moved to New York, but when his editor changed, he decided to concentrate on non-fiction.
One of his first books, Mathematics, Magic, and Mystery (1956), concerned the maths of popular magic tricks. Shortly afterwards, his interest in the philosophy of science led to his skeptical classic, Fads, and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957). He would continue to expose what he saw as scientific fraud and quackery for more than 50 years. In 1976, together with Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and others, he founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. His articles on the Church of Scientology angered the church.
Gardner was 42 when he wrote his first Mathematical Games column. He became a kind of father figure to a generation of young mathematicians, who corresponded with him and whose work he popularised. Gardner managed to make serious maths palatable by concentrating on puzzles that could be easily expressed and understood, even if the maths behind them was complex. He showcased cutting-edge developments such as Benoît Mandelbrot's fractals, Roger Penrose's aperiodic tiles, and John Horton Conway's Game of Life. His column on MC Escher brought the Dutch artist's optical illusions to a wider audience.
He supported himself as a freelance writer, working for eight years as a contributing editor to Humpty Dumpty's Magazine. This ended in 1957 when, drawing on his interest in magic, he sold his first article to Scientific American. Fascinated when a magician showed him a paper toy called a hexaflexagon, Gardner contacted the inventor, John Tukey, a mathematician at Princeton, and with Tukey's permission and help, he wrote an article about hexaflexagons and the mathematics behind them.
Delighted, the Scientific American editors published it and asked for more. Martin Gardner scoured New York City for old books on recreational mathematics and found enough material to get the column going. Shortly thereafter, he began to draw material from recreational mathematics journals.
Gardner had a gift for simplifying ideas and communicating them wittily in a warm, playful spirit. His writing was so well received that mathematicians whose work had recreational aspects - Solomon Golomb, John Conway, Roger Penrose, and Frank Harary, among others - shared their discoveries with him. Through these contacts, his columns became more sophisticated, and he enabled mathematicians to present their work to a much larger audience.
By the early 80s, Gardner and his wife had moved to North Carolina, where he continued to write books and articles. By the early 80s, Gardner and his wife had moved to North Carolina, where he continued to write books and articles. After Charlotte's death in 2000, Gardner moved back to Oklahoma. He was still writing this year, with more than 70 books to his name. His last article, on the pseudoscience of Oprah Winfrey, was published in the March 2010 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer.
Martin Gardner was raised as a Methodist, later in his life, he began to consider himself a philosophical theist and a fideist.
Views
Central to Gardner's work was the belief that mathematics, whether formal or recreational, is enormously interesting and of vital importance to humankind. Mathematics is the solving of puzzles. Good puzzles, even if they appear to be of trivial importance, open the door to all sorts of useful interconnections, often leading to "better and better answers to puzzles posed by nature."
Quotations:
"As I have often said, electrons and gerbils don't cheat. People do."
"I can say this. I believe that the human mind, or even the mind of a cat, is more interesting in its complexity than an entire galaxy if it is devoid of life."
"There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry."
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1997
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
1976
Personality
Martin Gardner was described as self-educated, opinionated, cranky, and utterly unafraid of embarrassment.
Quotes from others about the person
"Gardner is the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us." - Stephen Jay Gould
"He was not a mathematician - he never even took a maths class after high school - yet Martin Gardner, who has died aged 95, was arguably the most influential and inspirational figure in mathematics in the second half of the last century." - Alex Bellos
Interests
Chess
Philosophers & Thinkers
Plato, Immanuel Kant, William James, Charles S. Peirce, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Henry Dudeney, Sam Loyd, Bertrand Russell
Writers
L. Frank Baum, G. K. Chesterton, Miguel de Unamuno, H. G. Wells
Connections
Martin Gardner married in 1952, having been introduced to his future wife Charlotte Greenwald by magician Bill Simon. They had two sons, Jim and Tom.
Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner
The autobiography of the beloved writer who inspired a generation to study math and science Martin Gardner wrote the Mathematical Games column for Scientific American for twenty-five years and published more than seventy books on topics as diverse as magic, religion, and Alice in Wonderland.