– Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner had no formal mathematical training. A newspaper reporter, publicist, freelancer for Esquire, caseworker, magician, skeptic, Navy sailor, and most famously, “Mathematical Games” columnist for Scientific American, Gardner displayed a boundless energy and enthusiasm for intellectual inquiry. A tireless advocate for science, his popular books and articles painstakingly argue against the dangers of pseudoscience in all forms.

On Saturday, Gardner passed away at the age of 95 in Norman, OK. He will be remembered for his prolific writing, wide-ranging interests, unquenchable curiosity, and infectious enthusiasm for the odder side of math. A writer first, Gardner’s triumph was in bringing the delight of discovery to his readers. Inquisitive and sharply analytic, he researched everything from origami and variations on tic-tac-toe to card tricks, probability, and his famous brain teasers – “an orgy of right-brain tomfoolery that could be approached for superficial fun or deep insight, or both at the same time…” – David Brooks, The Telegraph.

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Thank for puzzling us through the years, Martin Gardner (1914-2010).  Revisit some of our favorite moments on TSoTP with Mr. Gardner:

The Martin Gardner Interview – Part 1

The Martin Gardner Interview – Part 2

The Martin Gardner Interview – Part 3

The Martin Gardner Interview – Part 4

The Martin Gardner Interview – Part 5

Happy Birthday, Martin Gardner!

Martin Gardner Documentary

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And some puzzles!

[*N.B. These contests are no longer running, but will no doubt tease your brain and challenge your creativity... go here for our "Hall of Fame" responders.]

Professor on the Escalator Puzzle

Professor on the Escalator Answer / The Flight Around the World Puzzle

The Flight Around the World Answer / The Absent-Minded Teller Puzzle

The Absent-Minded Teller Answer / The Fork in the Road Puzzle

The Fork in the Road Answer / The Amorous Bugs Puzzle

The Amorous Bugs Answer / The Hole in the Sphere Puzzle

The Hole in the Sphere Answer

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And some miscellany!

Most Eminent Man of Letters and Numbers

More Gardner Goodies

Hexaflexa-what?

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“His was a clarifying intelligence: he said his talent was asking good questions and transmitting the answers clearly and crisply.”

– The New York Times: Martin Gardner, Puzzler and Polymath, Dies at 95

“[A] journalist whose omnivorous curiosity gave rise to wide-ranging writings that popularized mathematics, explored theology and philosophy, debunked pseudoscience and provided in-depth analysis of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat…”

– Washington Post: Martin Gardner, prolific math and science writer, dies at 95

“For Gardner, the game is the life.”

– Scientific American Profile: Martin Gardner, the Mathematical Gamester

In USA TODAY, Bjorn Lomborg gives his rather optimistic perspective:

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USA TODAY, April 21, 2010

Earth Day: Smile, don’t shudder

By Bjorn Lomborg

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Given all the talk of impending catastrophe, this may come as a surprise, but as we approach the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, people who care about the environment actually have a lot to celebrate. Of course, that’s not how the organizers of Earth Day 2010 see it. In their view (to quote a recent online call to arms), “The world is in greater peril than ever.” But consider this: In virtually every developed country, the air is more breathable and the water is more drinkable than it was in 1970. In most of the First World, deforestation has turned to reforestation. Moreover, the percentage of malnutrition has been reduced, and ever-more people have access to clean water and sanitation.

Apocalyptic predictions from concerned environmental activists are nothing new. Until about 10 years ago, I took it for granted that these predictions were sound. Like many of us, I believed that the world was in a terrible state that was only getting worse with each passing day. My thinking changed only when, as a university lecturer, I set out with my students to disprove what I regarded at the time as the far-fetched notion that global environmental conditions were actually improving.

To our surprise, the data showed us that many key environmental measures were indeed getting better. We also found a disturbing gulf between the chief concerns of rich countries and the problems that actually do the most damage to the world.

If anything, this gulf between perception and reality has gotten wider over the years. For example, one of the “core issues” that the organizers of this year’s Earth Day say we should be worrying about is the use of fertilizers and pesticides. It may be unfashionable to point this out, but without the high-yield agricultural practices developed over the past 60 years, virtually all the forests of the world would have to have been cleared to make way for food production. And starvation would be much, much more prevalent.

Climate change urgency?

Of course, in the minds of Earth Day activists, no environmental challenge is more urgent than the need to drastically cut carbon emissions in order to stop global warming. But is climate change really the No. 1 problem we face?

What about indoor air pollution, which happens to be the world’s No. 1 environmental killer? In poor countries, 2.5 billion people rely on “biomass” — wood, waste and dung — to cook and keep themselves warm. This year, the resulting pollution will kill about 1.3 million of them, mainly women and children. Switching from biomass to fossil fuels would dramatically improve the lives of more than a third of the world’s population. Unfortunately, you’re not likely to hear any of this year’s Earth Day speakers promoting greater use of fossil fuels in poor countries.

I’m not saying we can blithely ignore global warming. Man-made climate change is real, and we do need to do something about it. But in a world in which most developing countries depend almost exclusively on fossil fuels to power their economies, it’s both impractical and immoral to insist that the only solution is for everyone to drastically cut carbon emissions. This approach might make sense if we were able to offer developing countries practical, affordable alternatives to coal and oil. But we cannot— and as long as we can’t, all we’re really doing when we call for massive carbon cuts is asking the world’s poor people to continue living lives of misery and deprivation.

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Keep reading at USA TODAY for Lomborg’s take on helping the developing world first and some terrific excerpts from the Editorial Board’s conversation with Bjorn >>>

Bjorn Lomborg is author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and editor of the forthcoming Smart Solutions to Climate Change (September 2010).

Not only are the Beatles still good, they’re still relevant. Find out the inspiration for the project and check out an excerpt of the book all on WPSU. Listen here > > >

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And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the book review by Beatlefan Magazine Contributing Editor, Kit O’Toole on blogcritics.org.

If you are a Beatles fan looking to study their music and impact, The Cambridge Companion to The Beatles provides an excellent starting point. Chapters will make you rethink what you already know, and perhaps change your interpretations of their music. At the very least, the text spurs spirited discussion about various topics.

Read more at Blog Critics > > >

Interview

Manuela Costantino (MC): Why did Cambridge University Press decide to publish this book?

Sarah Stanton (SS): Cambridge decided to commission a History of Canadian Literature within its programme of Cambridge Histories (multi-author reference works) because we recognized that there was a clear library and institutional market for such a history, within Canada, but even more so within the USA (our largest single market for academic books of this kind) and Europe. That recognition was based on the self-evident distinction of Canadian writing, on the number of degree courses on the topic, and on the success of our recently published Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, a very different book (in level and extent) but tackling essentially the same subject area in abbreviated and student-friendly form. Is it appropriate to add that I myself am a keen reader of Canadian fiction? That of course should be no part of a tough-minded commercial decision to go ahead, but it added impetus to the decision-making process!

MC: Why did Cambridge University Press approach Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller to edit this volume?

SS: Each is expert in the field, with somewhat different specialties—a good thing. Each had been highly efficient and successful volume editor of a previous Companion, Kröller on Canadian Literature and Howells on Margaret Atwood. They knew each other and thought they could work well together. They also represent different constituencies, Canada and the UK, and therefore markets, so would be likely to commission a wide range of contributors, which would appeal to readers globally. They are also lovely people to work with, with a keen sense of timetable and well connected within the field, therefore likely to attract the best authors and, eventually, reviewers.

MC: How did the fact that you are international and multilingual scholars affect your editing of the book?

Eva-Marie Kröller (EMK): As Sarah Stanton has already pointed out, we teach at British and Canadian universities respectively and so bring these two different perspectives into the picture. As well, we maintain strong professional and personal connections with our countries of origin, Australia and Germany, and were able to draw on a large network of international scholars of Canadian and Commonwealth literature. Finally, we are both francophiles, and one particularly enjoyable part of the collaboration was the ability to ruminate with a knowledgeable partner about the elusive meaning of a caption in Old French, for example.

Coral Ann Howells (CAH): I think our own international backgrounds as teachers and conference goers over many years have served us well as editors, because we have both gained a good working knowledge of who is doing what in Canadian and postcolonial studies. For a book like this dealing with such a mass of materials, we needed to be able to identify scholars with certain areas of expertise, and to find comparativists who are familiar with both anglophone and francophone literatures—something we have been able to do. We have contributors from Canada and the USA, also from Britain (both of whom are Australians), France, Germany, and Spain. To end on a trans-Canadian note, I might add that the chapter on fiction in French was written by two francophone scholars from Quebec, who teach at UBC, and the chapter on poetry in French by a scholar from Franco-Ontario, who teaches at the University of Ottawa.

MC: Did the fact that you are women play an important role in the editing of the volume?

CAH: Yes.

Continue reading at Canadian Literature >>

Start from the beginning of the interview here >>

My Favorite Book

DA: Which of your books is in some sense a favorite?

Gardner: I think my Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener is my favorite because it is a detailed account of everything I believe.

DA: When you tell people what you believe, unless it’s Pablum-like, there’s likely to be some strong reaction.

Gardner:Well, the book is controversial because almost everybody who believes in a personal god is into an established religion. The idea of believing in God and not being affiliated with any particular religion is a strange kind of a position to take.

DA: Did the reviews really focus on that?

Gardner: It didn’t get many reviews. It got some good reviews mainly by Christians. The best review was by an Anglican priest, who reviewed it for an Anglican journal. It was a ten-page review. That was the best review it ever got. Actually, a lot of liberal Protestants and very liberal Catholics are really philosophical theists, but they won’t use the term. A lot of prominent Protestant preachers who are liberal Protestants don’t buy any of the traditional doctrines. Take Harry Emerson Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale, for example. You don’t know what they believed about any Christian doctrine. I don’t think Norman Vincent Peale bought the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection, but he had a big following among conservative Protestants.

DA: You’ve talked about the surprise you threw at some readers in your The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, when you said you are a philosophical theist. For those who don’t know what the term means, you began to explain that this is a belief in a god, and you said in your case that prayer was a part of it, and that you believe in a hereafter.

Gardner: That’s true, I do.

DA: What does your hereafter look like?

Gardner: You can’t say anything about it at all. It’s like talking about attributes of God. It’s in a transcendental realm, and you just believe by hope and a leap of faith that there’s that possibility, but you can’t say anything about it in any detail because obviously nobody knows anything about it. I don’t buy the mediums who communicate with the dead. There’s no empirical evidence for it, and no logical proof, but the possibility is open. If there is a personal god, an after existence follows automatically if you think that God is just, because obviously nature doesn’t care anything about human life. A thousand people can be snuffed out of existence by an earthquake. So to me, the belief in a personal god and belief in some kind of immortality is part of the same leap of faith. It’s hard to have one without the other. But I certainly don’t know that there is an afterlife, in the sense of having any kind of knowledge. It’s a peculiar thing in my brain. It may even have a genetic basis. Philosophical theism is entirely emotional. As Kant said, he destroyed pure reason to make room for faith.

DA: How long have you been a philosophical theist? Did it develop over a long period of time?

Gardner: Absolutely yes—it is a remnant I saved out of my Protestant past.

DA: I don’t know if it’s any comfort, but you’re certainly back in Protestant country again, here in North Carolina.

Gardner: Oh yes, there are lots of Seventh Day Adventists around here. I was quite interested in the Adventist movement when I was in high school. George McCready Price, a prominent Adventist, convinced me that evolution was a false theory when I was in high school. I have a collection of his books. He wrote about 15 or 20 books.

DA: Of the sixty books you’ve done, some have sold very well—The Annotated Alice certainly has done well.

Gardner: Yes, it has sold more than a million copies if you include paperbacks and translations. It has never been out of print.

DA: How do you explain your fascination with Alice in Wonderland?

Gardner: I share with Carroll the following loves: mathematics, puzzles, formal logic, and conjuring. Carroll delighted in showing simple magic tricks to his child friends, and to take them to performances by magicians. More than any other books for children, his two Alice books swarm with logical, mathematical, and linguistic jokes. I did not discover the richness of this kind of humor in the Alice books until I was in my twenties, but since then I have felt a close kinship with Carroll.

DA: How about Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science?

Gardner: This was an early book. It was remaindered by Putnam’s, but Dover reprinted it and it has been one of their best sellers—still in print.

Pseudoscience—Worse Than Ever

DA: You continue to be involved with debunking pseudoscience and the paranormal with your work for The Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Two decades ago you expressed concern about the spread of pseudoscience and ideas about the paranormal. At the time you didn’t think that things were getting better. This is 21 years later. Is it better?

Gardner: I don’t think so, I think it gets worse and worse. The real damage comes to people who rely on alternative medicine, and don’t go to a regular doctor. For example, instead they take a homeopathic dose, which doesn’t do them any harm, but if they rely on it instead of going to a doctor, you get real tragedies. But alternative medicine keeps growing stronger and stronger, with more and more people involved. Homeopathic drugs are now in mainline drug stores, here in town (Hendersonville). Of course, you’re buying nothing but distilled water, because they dilute it to the point where there aren’t any molecules left. The

Martin Gardner with Alice in Central Park

homeopathic dose is supposed to be the strongest when there’s the least amount of the drug in the water. They keep diluting it so many times that the probability is very high there is not even a molecule left. So they have to claim that there’s some sort of mysterious way in which the water remembers the properties of the drug. On college campuses, that’s a big problem among students who go to homeopathic physicians. Of course the drugs can’t do any harm, unless of course they’re relying on them, and don’t go to a regular physician for something really dangerous.

DA: They probably won’t do any good either.

Gardner: Well, at least the drugs have a placebo effect. Now there’s a big revival of magnetic therapy. I never expected this to happen. The use of magnets to cure all kinds of diseases was very popular in the nineteenth century. Magazines were filled with ads about magnetic devices, which you would wear under your clothes, in your shoes, and so on. Parade Magazine has run big ads for magnetic soles that you put in your shoes. They have little magnets in them, and are supposed to do all kinds of things to keep you healthy. Magnetic bracelets are popular, too.

DA: What other disturbing things of that sort are growing in importance?

Gardner: Well, there are psychics all over television, making lots of money. There are mediums now who will talk to your departed ones. They are appearing on numerous popular talk shows. Larry King had one on his show just a few weeks ago, a medium you can phone, and he will bring to you messages from your dead relatives.

DA: Larry King? I thought he was a bit better than that.

Gardner: Well, I’m sure he didn’t buy any of it. But it’s great theater.

DA: So your level of optimism is not very high.

Gardner: And, of course, UFOology is going as strong as ever. There are believers who have top posts at major universities, who are into UFOology, and write crazy books about it. It’s hard to believe, but Margaret Mead believed in UFO’s and wrote about how they were piloted by friendly extraterrestrials!

DA: What bright spots do you see out there?

Gardner: Oh, I don’t know. The Skeptical Inquirer magazine may be doing a little bit of good in reaching media people and alerting them to the other side of the story. But I think it’s a losing battle. It preaches to the choir.

Improving Mathematics Education

DA: Let’s suppose we had a ministry of education, like many countries do, and you were placed in charge of education. What would be some of your top priorities?

Gardner: Oh gosh, I don’t know. I believe in free speech, and I don’t believe in muzzling a pseudoscientist. In the medical field, I would try to give more funding to the FDA, for they’re almost powerless to stop all kinds of harmful drugs. Our local paper recently had a full-page ad for a weight reducing drug that actually kills people. It’s based on a plant that grows in the Orient, and operates by expanding in the stomach when it hits water. The stomach, as it expands, gives you the feeling of fullness. So you don’t eat as much, and that’s how you lose weight. But the trouble is, it can expand in the esophagus, and people can choke to death. There’ve been a number of cases of people choking to death, taking this drug. By the time the FDA closes down one of these firms, they simply move to another town, and change the name of the drug. Whenever ads for such drugs appear in the local paper, I write a letter about it, saying the paper should not run such ads. The paper always runs my letters, but it has no effect on the advertising department.

DA: Money still talks.

Gardner: Yes.

DA: As education minister you’d have your say about math teaching in elementary schools and high schools. There certainly are some basic problems about adequate compensation of teachers.

Gardner: I think that’s the key—to increase the pay of the teachers, to get some teachers that really know and love math. That’s the big problem.

DA: When you were a kid you had a great teacher, Pauline Baker Perry. You dedicated one of your books to her, too.

Gardner: She was single when I was in high school, but then later she married the basketball coach. She was quite young and attractive then.

DA: But she was able to survive then, on a low salary.

Gardner: Right, and after she married I think she continued teaching until she died or retired. I don’t think much of the new-new math—the fuzzy math, as they call it.

DA: Have you looked at the new NCTM Standards?

Gardner: I haven’t seen the latest. But I did a long article in The New York Review of Books, attacking a particular book. [The New New Math, New York Review of Books, Volume 45, Number 14, 1998.]

DA: A high school book?

Gardner: Yes.

DA: What about the materials that you have seen for school mathematics these days?

Gardner: The main idea of fuzzy math is to arrange students in small groups that cooperatively discover the theorems. You’ll have a group of maybe seven students and instead of teaching them the Pythagorean theorem you’ll have them cut out triangles and so on, and try to discover it themselves. And, of course, it gets the teacher off the hook. She doesn’t have to do much teaching, she just lets the students fool around, and try to discover theorems. What happens is there is usually one bright student in the group who does all
the work and the others go along. It may take them a week to discover the Pythagorean theorem. I think this is a big waste of time. Most studies show that the students in fuzzy math classes don’t do very well in tests later.

DA: Part of the theory is that when you get into the real world, whatever that is, you’ll be part of a group, a team, so you really need to learn how to work together, and problem solve collectively.

Gardner: Yes, I know, that’s the theory.

DA: But I think you’re right about the difficulties in kids really cooperatively putting this stuff together. I guess another aspect of this is that we’re supposed to appreciate how this is going to really increase their motivation to learn the material.

Dinner with Gödel

DA: Let’s move back to math for just a minute. You’ve lived long enough now to see a lot of really interesting mathematical ideas hit the scene, and there are also some really beautiful ideas that were here long before you were on the scene. First, during your own lifetime, what ideas, what discoveries just kind of knocked your socks off?

Gardner: Well, I think the most interesting developments are mainly in mathematical physics, and that’s the development of superstring theory. That came as a complete surprise to me. It’s a beautiful theory of particles, and it may or may not be true, but it’s thehottest thing in town now in particle physics. It opens up the possibility that higher dimensions are not just artifacts but actually real. There was an article in the New York Times recently, on speculation that there are higher dimensions that are not even rolled up or coacted, but there’s a lot of theoretical work going on now by superstring experts who view our entire universe as embedded in an infinite fifth dimensional space. In the past, speculation about higher dimensions has been crankish, by mystics, who were speculating ‘oh, that’s the transcendental realm in which God exists,’ and so on. Now it’s becoming a very real possibility in modern physics.

DA: Ed Witten, the high priest of string theory, was honored by the mathematical community in 1990 when he won a Fields medal. Mathematicians tend to be pretty careful in passing out Fields medals. He could end up with a Nobel Prize, too, which would be a rarity. But just the fact that he is a physicist winning mathematics’ top prize is very impressive.

Gardner: He’s made a lot of interesting new developments in knot theory. I don’t understand it at all, but apparently knot theory now ties in with quantum mechanics in some mysterious way that I don’t understand. A few years ago I went to a conference honoring Andrew Wiles. I went partly to hear Witten talk, and also to hear Penrose talk. I understood everything Penrose said and I understood nothing that Witten said. Absolutely nothing, not a single sentence. He kept talking about “loop groups,” and I had never heard of
loop groups before.

DA: So the most exciting developments for you have been in mathematical physics.

Gardner: Right.

DA: You’ve read a lot of contemporary material, and you’ve read a lot by those who have been gone a long time. Are there any of those departed people that you’d like to sit down with over dinner, or visit with in your library and chat with them?

Gardner: I’d love to chat with Gödel for example. He had some strange cosmological views, and I’d like to talk to him about that, about time travel into the past. I never could quite understand that. And of course he was a dedicated Platonist. He thought all of mathematics was out there, including the transfinite numbers. I’d enjoy talking to him about that. Of course I’d love to talk with Einstein and Neils Bohr. Among puzzle makers, I’d most want to talk with Henry Dudeney and Sam Loyd.

DA: They really rang your bell.

Gardner: I also would enjoy talking to Bertrand Russell. He’s one of my heroes. I guess you could call him a mathematician.

DA: Absolutely. Look at his work on Principia Mathematica with Whitehead, and his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. He was a big influence on me when I was young.

Gardner: He was a realist in mathematics. He believed that mathematical objects and theorems have a peculiar kind of existence, not the same as that of stars and stones, but a reality independent of human minds and cultures. A prime number of, say, a trillion digits, is prime even if no one knows it is prime. Andromeda was a spiral nebula long before any humans observed it. I remember a statement he made once that “2 plus 2 is 4 even in the interior of the sun.”

“I’m strictly a journalist.”

DA: Here’s an equally easy question for you. Once you’ve departed this life, let’s suppose you had an opportunity to come back in a hundred years. What questions would you most want to know the answers to that might have been developed during that time?

Gardner: I guess I’d be interested to know if various famous unsolved problems had been solved, such as the Goldbach Conjecture. But I don’t have any great desire to come back and learn what modern mathematics is up to. You’re giving me credit for being more of a mathematician that I really am. I’m strictly a journalist. I just write about what other people are doing in the field.

DA: Well, I know you’ve said that many a time, but you actually have some mathematical papers to your credit, too.

Gardner: Yes, but they’re low-level math. I do have an Erdös number of two, in a couple of ways, through Ron Graham and Frank Harary.

DA: Those are good links. When I posed the question, it didn’t necessarily have to pertain to mathematics. For example, we might wonder if we are going to make it as a civilization?

Gardner: That’s true. I would like to know if we colonize Mars, and if we found any evidence of life on Mars. Of course the most stupendous development would be, hearing from some extraterrestrial civilization. That would really upset everything. I have no opinion on that one way or the other, as to whether there is any intelligent life out there.

DA: Johnny Wheeler says, as you know, that the universe is a home for man.

Gardner: That’s right, Wheeler is one of those people who thinks that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. He bases this on the extreme improbability of life getting started. And he may be right.

DA: There’s a new book that picks up on that notion, it’s called Rare Earth. Peter Taylor and Donald Brownlee at The University of Washington—well respected scientists, who are really looking at the physical and chemical ideas that are so important to life as we know it. They rate the probability as low, but, of course, the qualifier is ‘life as we know it.’

Gardner: That’s right. Life could take all kinds of strange forms. Finding it on other planets would be the most exciting development that I can think of in the next 50 years. But I have no emotional feeling one way or the other. I’m content either way.

DA: I also want to ask you about your Annotated Casey at the Bat. You’ve annotated several famous poems, such as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Carroll’s Hunting of the Shark, and Carroll’s Phantasmagorie.

Gardner: I had a lot of fun doing Casey, I dug up a lot of sequels to the poem, and I tried to weld them all together into a coherent story as if Casey really existed.

DA: How do you account for the popularity of some of these poems that are not in some case gems, but they catch on.

Gardner: Well, I’ve done two anthologies of popular verse for Dover. One was called Famous Poems of Bygone Days. I certainly don’t think they’re up there with Keats or Shakespeare, because I tend to be a classicist in the kind of poetry I most admire, but I do think that a lot of popular verse is more worth reading than some of the poets who have vast reputations. I’m very down on free verse. If a poem doesn’t have some kind of melody, it doesn’t have to be rhyme or meter, but if it doesn’t have any music involved, well it’s just prose broken into lines. So I have a very low opinion of William Carlos Williams and half a dozen other modern poets who I don’t think write poetry at all.

A lot of people think that I have a very high regard for popular verse, above that of the great poets. That’s not true, of course. But I would rather reread something by Byron or Keats than to read anything by Carlos Williams, I’ve never found one poem by him that I wanted to memorize. Anyway, I’ve done the two books for Dover, and in the introductions I sound off about my biases. I did another book of annotated popular verse, called the Annotated Night Before Christmas, now out of print. It’s a collection of parodies and sequels that have been written about The Night Before Christmas. That poem and Casey, and maybe the Old Oaken Bucket, have been the most parodied American poems.

I’ve written a number of parodies myself. I have a parody in my Casey book titled, Casey’s Son, it’s attributed to Nitram Rendrag, my name spelled backwards. And I’ve got some other parodies that get published now and then. I have one in the current issue of Free Inquiry. It’s a parody of The Village Blacksmith, about Ventura, the village wrestler. In 2001, Prometheus Books published Poetic Parodies a collection of parodies of famous poems. In this book, I have the original poem first, followed by one or more parodies of the poem. Almost all of them are in public domain; they’re old parodies, of such favorites as Poe’s Raven, the Old Oaken Bucket. Some are pretty funny. My parodies are credited to Armand T. Ringer, an anagram of my name.

DA: I look forward to reading it.

Adam, Eve, and Navels

DA: In 1979, you talked about retiring from Scientific American that year, because you were going to turn 65. Some of us expressed real sadness at the fact that you weren’t going to be cranking out those monthly columns anymore. You said that there were other things that you really wanted to write about that you were afraid you were never going to get to unless you gave up the columns. You’ve had a lot of time to do that and you’re written quite a lot since then.

Gardner: Well, I do a regular column in The Skeptical Inquirer, and those columns get reprinted in books. There’s one due out in another month. Norton is doing a collection of Skeptical Inquirer columns. My editor there is Bob Weil who earlier was at St. Martin’s. Now he’s a top editor at Norton. He thought of a great title for the book—“Did Adam and Eve have Navels?” That was one of my columns. It’s a very perplexing problem for Biblical fundamentalists. It’s hard to figure out, because if they had navels it indicated an event that never took place. And of course it applies to hundreds of other things too. Did trees in the Garden of Eden have rings? If they were really trees, they had to have rings, but the rings indicate growth over time, alternate winters and summers.

DA: So how did you deal with the navel problem?

Gardner: I just sort of give a history of it, and various opinions that theologians have had toward the problem.

DA: I’d never heard that posed as a problem before, but I can understand why it would drive some people crazy.

Gardner: Oh, it’s a big problem for fundamentalists. Whenever I meet fundamentalists I usually ask them about that, and they’re very puzzled.

DA: I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of your own favorite authors. You’ve revealed the names of some of them in your writing. Chesterton, for one, must be pretty high on your list.

Gardner: I’m very fond of Chesterton, without, of course, buying his Catholicism. I’m not a Catholic. Chesterton didn’t convert to Catholicism until rather late in life. I admire Chesterton mainly for his fiction. His masterpiece was a novel called, The Man Who Was Thursday. I recently annotated it for a Catholic house, because only a Catholic firm would have allowed me to annotate it. Ignatius Press is a Catholic publisher in San Francisco. Last year they published the, The Annotated Thursday. This is a fantasy novel by Chesterton, and I think it’s a masterpiece; it’s all about free will and the problem of evil. I could tell you the entire plot but it would take a while. It’s about a man named Sunday who’s running an anarchist organization in London. Chesterton wrote this at a time when anarchism was a big deal. The council of this anarchist society is made up of seven men who are named after days of the week, and this is about the man who was Thursday on the chief council. But it ends up as a theological fantasy and Sunday becomes a symbol of nature, which has a good and evil side. It’s a very complicated philosophical novel. I recommend it entirely, and, of course, Chesterton is mostly famous for the Father Brown books. I did annotate a Father Brown book, published by Oxford. There were six Father Brown books. The first was called, The Innocence of Father Brown, and I did an annotated edition. I’ve done introductions for Dover to a number of Chesterton’s other books of fiction.

Another of my favorite authors is H. G. Wells. Wells and Chesterton were friends, and you can’t imagine two people who were so opposite in their views because Wells was an atheist. In his youth he went through a brief period believing in the finite god concept, the concept of a limited god, then he outgrew that and became an atheist. Chesterton, of course, converted to Catholicism, and became a devout Catholic.

Philosophical Theism

I did a confessional, I don’t know if you’ve seen it or not, called The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. I have a chapter in there where I say that if you can imagine someone who can admire both Wells and Chesterton, then you get a glimpse of my own philosophical views. I am a philosophical theist. I believe in a personal god, and I believe in an afterlife, and I believe in prayer, but I don’t believe in any established religion. This is called philosophical theism. It was defended by a lot of famous philosophers, starting with Kant. It includes Charles Pierce and William James and my favorite philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish philosopher, who’s not very well known, Ralph Barton Perry, Edgar Brightman, and I could name a lot of other thinkers who were philosophical theists without identifying themselves with any particular religion.

My wife Charlotte and I were a mixed marriage, by the way. She was Jewish, but we were both philosophical theists. When we got married, I wanted to affiliate with a reformed synagogue, but Charlotte refused because she had no beliefs in traditionalJudaism, any more than I have in Christianity. She countered by saying that we could join a Methodist Church, since my background was Methodist. I refused. So we didn’t go to any church, but we profess a kind of philosophical theism which enables me to admire many religious writers like Chesterton.

DA: Do you think that there may in fact be a larger body of people out there who, whether they know it or not, are philosophical theists?

Gardner: I think so, yes.

DA: But for whatever reasons, they don’t find it wise or comfortable to say things like that.

Gardner: That’s right, absolutely. There are a lot of closet philosophical theists. I just wrote a long review of Gary Wills’ new book, Papal Sin, a vigorous attack on the Catholic Church, on the hierarchy. He is a devout Catholic, but he doesn’t believe in any of the unique Catholic doctrines. He doesn’t believe in the Immaculate Conception, he doesn’t believe in the Virgin birth, he doesn’t believe in the Assumption of Mary, and he doesn’t believe in Papal infallibility. So I praised the book, in a review for the L.A. Times. I end it by saying to Wills “We need to know what you really believe.” I give a list of six questions I would like for him to answer, and of course he’s not going to answer any of them. I say that this mystery about what he really believes hangs like a kind of gray fog over everything he writes about religion. He’s written several books about religion, all of them a blast at Roman popes and traditional dogmas. I can’t imagine why he calls himself a Catholic. He wants to reform the Church. Of course, he’s not going to.

DA: Not with all of those points of attack under his belt.

Gardner: He has harsh things to say about Pope John Paul. Wills started out as a friend of William Buckley, and his first job was working on the National Review. He had been in a Jesuit seminary until he left the seminary to take a job as a book reviewer and drama critic for Buckley. They became good friends, but now they’re at opposite poles. Buckley believes all the Catholic doctrines; he’s an ultraconservative Catholic. He did a book recently, a confessional. Buckley is more conservative in his religious views than he is politically; he’s ultra orthodox. He’s even mad at the church for dropping the Friday prohibition on meat eating. Nearer, My God is the title of Buckley’s latest book, the first he’s written about his religion opinions. I reviewed it unfavorably for the L.A. Times.

The Trap Door Spiders

DA: To date, you’ve written more than 60 books.

Gardner: The count is rather vague because some of the books I’ve written are pamphlets or booklets, in the magic field. You don’t know whether to call them books or not, because they are more like paperbound booklets that may be only 50 pages or so. But if you consider hardcover books, it’s about 60.

DA: By any standard, that’s a lot.

Gardner: Of course I’m far behind Isaac Asimov; he did over 300. I got to know Isaac pretty well when I lived in New York. We belonged to a very strange little group that met once a month called the “Trap Door Spiders.” Did I ever tell you about that?

DA: No, please do.

Gardner: It started out as a group of science fiction writers, about 20 members, all male, who met once a month. Wives are not invited. Members take turns sponsoring the dinners. The person who sponsors the dinner gets to invite a guest. After the dinner is over the guest is put on the hot seat and you can ask him or her any question. A female can be aguest, but not a member of the organization. Members included Lester Delray and Fletcher Pratt, a couple of top science fiction writers. I got myself voted in. You can become a member only when a member dies. It’s sort of a secret organization. Isaac was one of the members, so I got to see him every month when we met for dinner.

Isaac wrote a series of mystery stories based on the “Trap Door Spiders,” called theBlack Widow Spider’s Mysteries. They appeared first in Ellery Queen’s mystery magazine, and later came out as books. They’re very funny stories, very Chesterton-like, they’re similar in some ways to the Father Brown stories in the type of gimmicks Asimov uses. Every story follows the same pattern of the Black Widow Spiders having these monthly dinners in which they invite a guest, but in Asimov’s stories the guest has to be someone with a mystery that needs to be solved, not necessarily a murder mystery but some type of mystery. So the guest tells all the details about the mystery, then the members of this club bring their experiences to bear and try to figure it out. The mystery is finally solved, and this is in every story, by Henry the waiter. He serves the dinner, and listens to everything everybody says. They’re very close to solving the mystery, but they can’t quite solve it, and so Henry says, “Have you gentlemen considered…” and Henry finally solves it. Every story follows that pattern. When I was living in New York I brought Steve Kanfer, who was a neighbor of mine, as a guest and they voted him in as a member. He has just hit the jackpot with his biography of Groucho Marx. You’ve probably been reading about it.

DA: Yes, there was a front-page review of it in New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago.

Gardner: Yes, it’s doing very well. Kanfer, a former book review editor of Time, lived in Hastings-on-Hudson a few blocks from us; I got to know him well. He recently sold movie rights to his Groucho biography.

DA: Who knows, you may get movie rights to one of your books.

Gardner: No, I was hoping maybe my Oz book would be a candidate, but nobody picked it up. Naturally I think it would make a great movie.

Next Week: More Pseudoscience, more Math, and Gardner Today

Read on >>

Navy Service

DA: In December of 1941, the U.S. entered World War II and you enlisted in the Navy.

Gardner: I ended up serving on DE 134, a destroyer escort, in the Atlantic. I was miserably seasick for about three days, and then I was never seasick again. I couldn’t wait for the war to end, but later I looked back at it as a rather pleasurable time of my life. You’re on a ship, you make friends with your shipmates, you got liberties now and then, and you didn’t have to worry about anything.

I’ve had migraine headaches all my life that were fairly severe when I was in high school. When I enlisted in the Navy, I did not list my migraines because I was afraid they wouldn’t take me. I feared that I might develop migraine headaches during battle situations. We were part of a so-called “killer group” of six destroyers looking for German submarines. During my four years in the Navy, I never had a migraine headache. I’m convinced that they’re associated with periods of anxiety. When you’re in the Navy, you don’t worry about what you’re going to do tomorrow, what tie to put on, etc. You just follow orders. In a way, you have a big sense of freedom. Otherwise, I have no other explanation.

DA: But when the war ended, you were glad to get out.

Gardner: At the time I was glad to get out. I was the yeoman who decommissioned the ship in Green Cove Springs, Florida. It was what they called a ‘Caribou’ for six. We worked together, sweeping and looking for German subs. When they were mothballed in Florida there was one missing; it got torpedoed and sunk.

DA: Over what period of time were the six DE’s together?

Gardner: The whole time I was on the DE.

DA: Which was how many years?

Gardner: About three years. Before going to sea, I spent about a year at Madison, Wisconsin, which had a radio training school there. I handled public relations for the school, and edited a school newspaper.

DA: In 1942, German submarines were devastating allied shipping.

Gardner: Yes, they were. We were very lucky. This happened before I joined the DE, but when I went aboard the sailors were all talking about it. The group actually captured a German submarine early in the war, intact, and towed it back. It was top secret, nobodyknew about it. Now that submarine is on exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. I had the pleasure of walking through it one day when I was in Chicago. But that happened before I was on the ship; I missed that action. But we did take back a German submarine at the end of the war that surrendered to us.

The Horse on the Escalator

DA: So then you were mustered out, and promptly went back to Chicago.

Gardner: Yes, I went back, and I could have had my old job back in the public relations office at The University of Chicago because there was an understanding that if you enlisted in the service you could get your old job back. But the one reason I didn’t go back to the PR office was that I sold a story, my first sale, and it was to Esquire Magazine. It was a short story, called “The Horse on the Escalator.” It was a humorous story, a crazy story. It was about a man who collected shaggy dog jokes about horses, sort of nonsense jokes about horses. The title of the story, “The Horse on the Escalator,” came from a joke going around at the time about a man who entered Marshall Field’s department store on a horse,and the elevator operator told him he couldn’t take the horse on the elevator. And he said, “but lady, he gets sick on the escalator!” That was the shaggy dog joke about a horse. And that was the title of my story. It’s a story about a man who collected horse jokes, and his wife didn’t think any of them were funny, but she laughed heartily every time he told one to conceal the fact that she didn’t think they were funny. So that was my first story, and that was the first time I had gotten paid. I had articles published before in little magazines, but they didn’t pay anything. I decided that maybe I could make a living as a freelance writer, and I very quickly sold Esquire a second story, and that was the “No-Sided Professor,” about topology. That’s one I had anthologized a number of times. So all of a sudden I was making pretty good money, and I lived on sales to Esquire for about a year or two. I sold them about 12 stories. They’re collected in a book by the way, titled The No-Sided Professor and Other Stories. Not all of my Esquire stories are in there; a few that I didn’t think were very good were left out. Some of the stories are from other magazines.

DA: Here’s the book, and here’s “The Horse on the Escalator.”

Gardner: That was my first story (laughing). By the way, it includes a long poem in free verse that I wrote about the ship I was on. It’s called, “So Long, Old Girl.” My son Jim called me a few weeks ago to ask if I had ever written a poem about a ship. And I said, “yes.” He said “did it have something about girls in it?” And I said, “yeah, why do you ask?” He has a son William who is interested in dramatics, and was trying out for a part at some dramatics school. Someone else, who was also trying out for a part, recited that poem. William said, “I think Grandfather wrote a poem about a ship. Somebody recited a poem, something about a ship called girl.” How he ever found that poem I don’t know. He must have picked it up from the book collection. I have written two other books of fiction. You probably know about them.

DA: The Flight of Peter Fromm I’ve read.

Gardner: You actually read it? My goodness!

DA: To what extent is it autobiographical?

Gardner: It is partly autobiographical. I don’t resemble Peter, the book’s hero, in personality or looks, but I did put him through changes in my own beliefs because when I was in high school I was converted to a very ugly Protestant fundamentalism, mainly through the influence of a Sunday School teacher who was later a counselor at a summer camp I went to. That didn’t last very long, but it lasted long enough for me to try to figure out some way I could preserve a belief in Christianity. I finally ended up deciding I couldn’t. So I put Peter through changes in my own beliefs, and in that sense it’s autobiographical.

DA: It’s a book you seem especially fond of. What motivated you to write it?

Gardner: I wanted to put into a novel my reasons for abandoning Christianity, but retaining a belief in God. I’m what in academic circles is called a “philosophical theist.”

Learning to Read with Oz

The other fiction book I did, you might not know about, is an Oz book that I wrote last year. I grew up on the Oz books, and I was really fond of them. I’ve done introductions to a lot of Dover reprints of books by L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz. My Visitors from OZ is an imitation of an L. Frank Baum Oz book. The Klein Bottle runs all the way though this book. In one of Baum’s Oz books, he had Glinda cast a spell over Oz, making it impossible for outsiders to visit Oz again. I argue in my Oz book that the spell that Glinda cast was moving Oz through a higher dimension into a parallel world. I used the science fiction concept of a parallel world, separated though the space of a fourth dimension.

The basic plot of this book is about how Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man visit New York City to help publicize a new movie about Oz. In order to get from the parallel world to Central Park, they make use of the Klein Bottle, because it’s open in the fourth dimension. So they slide though the Klein Bottle, and drop out through the spot where it’s going though the Fourth Dimension. That lands them into an adjacent parallel world, into Central Park. They use that to get to Central Park, then they use it to get back to Oz. The Klein Bottle, by the way, is made by a fellow named Ku-Klip. He’s the tinsmith who put the Tin Woodman together after the Woodman chopped his fleshly body to pieces with an enchanted ax. By the way, the book is doing much better in England than it is here, which is curious, you know, because Baum is an American author, and the English don’t know much about Oz. All they know is the Judy Garland film. This book had very few reviews, and the one review it got in the Washington Post wasn’t very favorable. The reviewer called it a “poor thing of a novel.” On the other hand, the London Times gave it a full-page admiring review.

Origin of Writing Interests

DA: When do you think your writing interests first appeared? Originally you said you were going to do physics, but then you ended up going to Chicago, where you discovered philosophy. Your first job was with the Tulsa Tribune as a reporter. When did the writing bug really hit you?

Gardner: Oh, I think not until I got out of the Navy, and that is when I started selling stories to Esquire.

DA: But you were writing before then.

Gardner: Yes, news releases and other minor stuff, but nothing of any great importance. I had some fiction published in “little magazines.”

DA: This was the Depression, and that had something to do with it. But why would you take a job as a reporter, because that’s deadline writing?

Gardner: It just happened to be available at the time; it was an opening. As a low-level job, I think I made $15 a week.

DA: So you had your own particular passion for writing.

Gardner: No, not especially.

DA: But then you went on to write news releases at The University of Chicago.

Gardner: Yes, the jobs I’ve had have been more or less accidental. I knew somebody who said there was an opening, and I knew someone in the public relations office who said there was an opening there. I needed a job, so I started work there.

DA: After the Esquire piece, you sold more stories to Esquire. That had to give you a lot of confidence, helping to convince you that you could earn a living as a writer.

Next week: Gardner’s first games column!

Read on >>

* * *

On October 21, Martin Gardner celebrated his ninetieth birthday. For 25 of his 90 years, Gardner wrote the monthly “Mathematical Games” column for Scientific American. His columns have inspired thousands of readers to learn more about the mathematics that he loved to explore and explain. Among his column correspondents were several distinguished mathematicians and scientists, including John Horton Conway, Persi Diaconis, Ron Graham, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Guy, Don Knuth, Sol Golomb, and Roger Penrose.

Gardner’s columns have earned him a place of honor in the mathematical community, which has given him many awards. But he has always declined invitations to accept awards in person, on the grounds that he is not a mathematician. “I’m strictly a journalist,” he insists. “I just write about what other people are doing in the field.” His modesty is admirable, but we insist that he is far more than a journalist. In addition to his massive contributions to mathematics, Gardner has written about magic, philosophy, literature, and pseudoscience.

Over his first ninety years, he has produced more than 60 books, most still in print; many have been bestsellers. His Annotated Alice has sold over a million copies, and the 15 volumes collecting his “Mathematical Games ” columns have gone through several printings (Now beginning a run with Cambridge as a complete set).

In his ninetieth year, he has returned to Oklahoma, where he was born. He is in good health and full of energy. We look forward to more from him as he begins his second 90 years. What follows is a portion of an interview done at Gardner’s home in Hendersonville, NC in the fall of 1990 and spring of 1991.

Magic

DA: In 1914 you were born in Oklahoma. What did your father do?

Gardner: My father was a geologist who owned his own oil company. He was what they called a “wildcatter.” It was a very small company consisting of himself, a secretary, and an accountant. He would go out and look for oil domes. This was before the seismograph. If he found a place that had a prospect of oil, he would hire a drilling company. Most of them were dry holes, but every once in a while he would hit oil.

DA: Does your interest in magic go back to your father?

Gardner: Magic wasn’t a special hobby of his, but he did show me some magic tricks when I was a little boy. I learned my first tricks from him, in particular one with a knife and little pieces of paper on it. I then got aquatinted with a few local magicians in Tulsa, Logan Waite and Wabash Hughes, who worked for the Wabash Railroad.

DA: At what age did this occur?

Gardner: I was a high school student at the time. I’ve never performed magic; it’s just been a hobby. The only time I got paid for doing magic was when I was a student at The University of Chicago; I used to work at the Marshall Field department store during the Christmas season demonstrating Gilbert magic sets. I learned a lot from the experience. That was the first time I realized that you’re really not doing a magic trick well until you’ve done it in front of an audience about a hundred times. Then it becomes second nature, and you know what to say.

DA: What are the elements of a successful magic trick?

Gardner: The most important thing is to startle people, and have them wonder how it’s done. Close-up magic that you do on a table right in front of people is very different from the stage illusions that David Copperfield does. It’s close-up magic that most intrigues me, especially those that have a mathematical flavor. In fact, I’ll show you a little trick here. (He then proceeded to demonstrate a neat topological trick that baffled the interviewer.) In recent years magicians have gotten interested in rubber band tricks that are all topologically based, i.e., they’re violating topological laws. There are entire books published on rubber band magic. (He then demonstrated another trick, and another.) I did a book for Dover Publications on mathematical tricks that has a chapter on topological tricks. I did two massive books for the magic profession: The Encyclopedia of Impromptu Magic and Martin Gardner Presents.

DA: (Looking at the books.) Massive is right.

Gardner: The first book covers tricks that don’t require any special equipment. A lot of them are just jokes and gags of the type ‘bet you can’t do this.’

DA: Your interest in magic is deep.

Gardner: I waste a lot of time on it. Dai Vernon was one of the great inventors of magic. He was a great influence on Persi Diaconis. Persi traveled with Dai for a long time. I knew Vernon very well. I knew Persi when he was a student at CCNY. You probably heard the story how he got into Harvard.

DA: As I recall, he gave you credit for writing a letter of recommendation to Fred Mosteller, the statistician.

Gardner: Mosteller is a magic buff. When Persi said he wanted to get into Harvard, I wrote to Fred and said that Persi can do the best bottom deal and second deal of anybody I know, and that got him into Harvard. I talked to Fred on the phone about it and he said, “Is he willing to major in statistics?” And Persi said sure he’d major in statistics if that would get him into Harvard. So he went up to Harvard, and they had a session together, probably doing card tricks. Mosteller got him into Harvard.

DA: Well, it was a good move on Mosteller’s part. I’m certainly convinced now that your interest in magic is just not a passing fancy.

Gardner: It’s my major hobby. I’ve enjoyed knowing a lot of famous magicians.

Tulsa Roots

DA: What did your mother do?

Gardner: She was a kindergarten teacher before marriage, but then became a housewife, caring for three children. Her hobby was painting, and I have a number of her paintings hanging in the house. Both of my parents lived into their nineties. I had a brother and sister, both younger, who are deceased. I learned to read before I went to school. My mother read the Wizard of Oz to me when I was a little boy, and I looked over her shoulder as she read it. I learned how to read that way. It was very embarrassing when I was in first grade, because the teacher would hold up cards that said ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ and I was always the first to call out the word. She had to tell me to shut up, to give the other children a chance to learn how to read.

DA: But don’t you think she was doing something to teach you to read?

Gardner: No, she didn’t even know I was learning how to read.

DA: As a kid, do you remember other strong interests in addition to magic?

Gardner: I was very good at math in high school. In fact, it and physics were the only subjects in which I got good grades. I was bored to death by the other classes. I flunked a class in Latin and had to take it over. I just don’t have a good ear for languages.

DA: How about sports?

Gardner: I played a lot of tennis. My father was fairly wealthy, and we had our own tennis court. I also was on the high school tumbling team. I particularly liked the high bar.

DA: Ron Graham is a good tumbler, too.

Gardner: Oh yes! Once I was meeting him for lunch at Bell Labs. A long flight of stairsled to the front door of building. Ron greeted me by walking down the stairs on his hands! He is also an expert juggler and unicycle rider.

DA: You said that you did well in physics, too.

Gardner: Yes. My goal was to go to Caltech. A lot of exciting physicists were there — Millikan for one. But Caltech at that time required two years of liberal arts at a college before transferring. So I went to The University of Chicago intending to transfer to Caltech after two years, but I got hooked on philosophy, mainly to find out what I believed.

DA: Did you encounter the philosopher Rudolph Carnap as an undergraduate?

Gardner: No, he wasn’t there then, but he was there after my four years of service in the Navy during World War II. Using the G.I. Bill, I went back to Chicago and took a course from him in the philosophy of science. I was so impressed by the course that I later persuaded him to do a book on the subject. His wife taped the lectures, and I edited them into a book. Carnap was a big influence on me. He convinced me that questions about metaphysics are meaningless since they cannot be answered empirically or by reason. The essence of Carnap’s philosophy is that an assertion has “cognitive content” only if it can be justified by logic or by empirical testing.

DA: You got your B.A. in 1936, then worked briefly for the Tulsa Tribune as a reporter, and then came back to The University of Chicago to the PR office writing news releases (primarily science releases), and took a graduate course from Carnap. What else did you do until the outbreak of World War II?

Gardner: I had various jobs. I worked as a caseworker for the Chicago Relief Administration, I had to visit 140 families regularly in what was called the Black Belt. I also had several odd jobs: waiter, soda jerk, etc. Remember, this was at the height of the Great Depression.

Next week: Gardner’s naval service

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