Martin Gardner has died, at age 95. In his memory, try to surprise yourself with a mathematical insight today.

I suspect this guy has something to do with how I ended up doing a Masters in Logic in Amsterdam. I read his books Aha! Gotcha and Aha! Insight in (I guess) primary school.1 They’re books of riddles, puzzles and paradoxes, amusingly illustrated, and with an emphasis on seeing (rather than calculating) the solution to a problem. My (probably faulty) memory says this is where I first met something like the Muddy Children puzzle (in the form of “What colour hat am I wearing?”), logical questioning puzzles like Knights and Knaves, the paradox of the unexpected hanging, Hilbert’s Hotel, four-dimensional geometry and hypercubes, and the various cool results you get by cutting a Möbius strip in different ways. I think Gardner probably also introduced me to Escher, although there I’m not quite so sure. You might guess that all this would have an effect on a young brain; you would be right.

More recently I’ve worked my way through The Colossal Book of Mathematics (property of Olga), in the process discovering Dewdney’s The Planiverse and rediscovering Conways Game of Life, the Soma cube (I built these in my grandfather’s workshop in high school), nontransitive dice, fractals (probably these also feature in the Aha! books), the Tic-Tac-Toe matchbox computer, which I also made in high school,2 and so on.

I’m glad Gardner had a long life, and I hope it was a happy one. He certainly enriched my childhood, and I still find unexpected delights in his (voluminous) writings today.

Notes:

  1. I borrowed them from the parents of a schoolfriend, and I may possibly have read them until the pages fell out. (I know I did that with Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, borrowed from the same folk.) Coincidentally, the parents-of-a-friend in question are arriving this afternoon to spend a few days with us in Amsterdam. [↪]
  2. Googling for this gets me lots of pages about writing computer programs to simulate it. This makes me sad. [↪]