{"id":2320,"date":"2010-05-24T16:13:33","date_gmt":"2010-05-25T00:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=2320"},"modified":"2010-05-27T15:08:47","modified_gmt":"2010-05-27T23:08:47","slug":"martin-gardner-1914-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/24\/martin-gardner-1914-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Gardner (1914 – 2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m sorry to report that Martin Gardner died on May 22, 2010. Scientific American is running some nice web pages <\/a>about him. Be sure to check the links at the bottom of the Scientific American<\/em> page, they have are four different pages to look at. And check the New York Times obit<\/a> as well.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll do a bit of a Martin celebration here as well. First of all I\u2019m posting the text of an article, \u201cMartin Gardner: Impresario of Mathematial Games<\/a>,\u201d\u009d that I wrote for a magazine called Science 81 <\/em>in 1981.<\/p>\n

Secondly, I wrote up a short note on Martin for a Milestone piece in next week’s Time <\/em>magazine—my note just appeared online<\/a>, and it will be in the print edition as well.<\/p>\n

And thirdly, here\u2019s an excerpt from my forthcoming memoir, Nested Scrolls<\/em>. This passage describes the trip that I took to North Carolina to interview Martin.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The beloved popular mathematics writer Martin Gardner had just retired from his post at Scientific American. <\/em>I\u2019d worshipped Martin\u2019s columns as a boy, and over the years I\u2019d corresponded with him a little bit\u2014he was great about answering his fan letters. So in the summer of 1981 I got Science 81 <\/em>to send me to interview him at his house in North Carolina.<\/p>\n

This was the first truly journalistic outing of mine, and I enjoyed it a lot. Martin was a kindly old guy, very sharp, and a wizard at sleight of hand. He showed me a trick where he made a coin move right through a sheet of latex rubber that he stretched tight over a shot-glass. He claimed he\u2019d made the coin move through the fourth dimension.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlease tell me the secret!\u201d\u009d I cried. \u201cI\u2019ll give you half the money I\u2019m being paid for this interview!\u201d\u009d I\u2019ve always been a sucker for the fourth dimension.<\/p>\n

Martin waved off my foolish offer. Not only did he show me how to work the trick, but he gave the requisite supplies so that I could mystify my family and friends. They appreciated the trick, not that any of them ever offered to pay me for the secret!<\/p>\n

Rather than using a tape recorder, I just jotted down notes on Martin\u2019s answers to my questions, and that was enough to help me later on when I had to write out the full answers on my typewriter. I have a very good memory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Something that impressed me about Martin was that he\u2019d been a freelance writer his whole life. He\u2019d even sold some mathematics-based science-fiction stories when he\u2019d been starting out. Up near the ceiling of his basement office, he had a very long bookshelf with all the books he\u2019d published, each title in numerous editions and translations. I dreamed that someday my books could fill a shelf like that.<\/p>\n

Before dinner Martin made martinis for his wife, himself and me, using a special glass eyedropper to measure out the vermouth. I went to motel and smoked a joint, then met Martin and his wife at a local restaurant for dinner. At the table, I excitedly rattled on about infinite dimensional space and parallel worlds. Martin and his wife gave each other a look. They knew exactly where I was at.<\/p>\n

The next morning, before I left, Martin lent me a box of rare books on the fourth dimension. And eventually he even wrote a preface for my book, The Fourth Dimension<\/em>, even though he had a philosophical disagreement with my mystical notion of an overarching One Mind. Martin was a pluralist, believing that there are many higher forces at work, rather than just one. He loved pondering arcane metaphysics, indeed he wrote a little-known novel about theology called The Flight of Peter Fromm<\/em>. A fascinating and warm-hearted man. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m sorry to report that Martin Gardner died on May 22, 2010. Scientific American is running some nice web pages about him. Be sure to check the links at the bottom of the Scientific American page, they have are four different pages to look at. And check the New York Times obit as well. I\u2019ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2320"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2330,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320\/revisions\/2330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}