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Martin Gardner ,""

MARTIN GARDNEiRs a remarkable man. He is most familiar as the author for many years of the Mathematical Games column of the Scientific American magazine. Every month thousands of readers of that magazine would turn eagerly to Gardner's column to find what was new in the world of recreational mathematics.

The articles were always written in an eminently readable style, whether he was retailing the witty frivolities of Dr.

Matrix, or giving an erudite exposition of some recent research.

I was privileged to stay with Martin and Charlotte Gardner at their former home in Hasting- s-on-Hudson, New York on several occasions. Many happy hours were spent pouring over some of the contents of Martin's den at the top of the house on Euclid Avenue. It was filled with puzzles, games, mechanical toys, scientific curiosities, and a host of other intriguing objects, exactly like a wizard's den. Not inappropriately, Martin is a keen amateur magician, and so has lots of magic books and of course he also has a large collection of the L. Frank Baum books about the Wizard of Oz. His other books were no less interesting.

Where else could you take a book at random off the shelf and discover that it was an entire novel written without using the letter "en? Don't let all of this give you the impression that Martin himself is in any way strange. In fact he is an intensely rational man, who has no patience with cranks, tricksters, or charlatans of any description. He has written many articles exposing various deceptions, and has a fine book, Fads and Fallacies irz the Name of Science, in which you can read the history of many of the spurious theories that are still prevalent today. That book,

though lightly written, is thoroughly researched, as is all of Martin's work. In fact, he is a very learned man, with a degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago, and has authored books on so many topics it's almost unbelievable, especially from such a quiet and modest person.

What interested me most in Martin's den was the filing cabinet. Martin writes regularly to a host of people, ranging from professional mathematicians to enthusiastic amateurs. Whatever mathematical items they produce are carefully sorted and indexed and inserted into the filing cabinet, which also contains lots of 3x5 inch record cards with descriptions of everything that is in any way related to his Scientific American columns.

Martin's columns were often about somebody else's work. Perhaps Miss X, a schoolgirl in Venezuela, would write to himabout a problem she heard from one of her friends. A look through the filing cabinet would turn up a research paper by Professor Y from the University of Z on something similar. Martin would write to Y about Miss X's question, and perhaps a month or two later there would be a column explaining the matter far more simply than Y himself ever could. Gardner always claims that he isn't a mathematician, and that this is why he can explain mathematics so clearly to the layman. But he's discovered quite a few elegant pieces of recreational mathematics, and has been indirectly responsible for very much more, by stimulating so many other people. Indeed, most of the young mathematicians I meet tell me enthusiastically how they were brought up on "Martin Gardner's column." Lots of items in this book remind me of those visits to Martin's house. Mrs. Perkins' Quilt (Chapter 11) was the subject of

one of my earliest letters to him, and there were certainly several games of Sprouts (Chapter 7) played at the kitchen table. It seems that twenty years has produced no new knowledge of Sprouts-who does win the 7-Spot normal game, or the 5-Spotmisere one?

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