Customer Reviews

Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Martin Gardner's 30 years of Mathematical Games columns in Scientific American magazine are some of the most fun and interesting reading I've enjoyed. I searched out back issues in the high school library, had my own subscription, and collected as many of the books as I could find. When I was looking for one of the books I didn't have and found this complete collection, I immediately ordered it. There are very few authors in any field who are as clear in their writing and as enthusiastic in their delivery as he is. The content is easily worth the full 5 stars.

But the reason I dropped the rating to 4 for this particular edition is its sometimes haphazard quality of image scans. In the worst cases, the color or shading in the original figures is now black-and-white and of such high contrast that important distinctions are mostly or completely lost. For example, the reversi piece colors in figure 29 of "New Mathematical Diversions" are indistinguishable as are the four-color map areas (of all things!) in figure 43. Many figures show moire patterns from rescanning the original halftones. Yet other figures have been reproduced with much greater care, even in color. Some pages with landscape layout have been rotated for easier reading but others have not. In a few cases, the black-and-white photographs in my books have been replaced with much better color photos. Some books are missing a back cover scan.

The oddest example though, and somehow in keeping with the topic, is figure 109 in "Fractal Music". In my copy of the book, this is a reproduction of Magritte's "The Two Mysteries" and the caption says so. In this edition, it is a redrawn version and the caption now says it is "a caricature" of the Magritte work. At least 4 of the books appear to be affected by poor images and at least 6 of them appear to be fine.

Despite these problems, it's very handy to have the complete set of books in one place. But I'll be keeping the 4 books with the bad scans until a new edition fixes them.

I got this for Christmas. Knowing it was a set of PDF files, I was hesitant to ask for it, because I was a little concerned that it would somehow be DRM-limited so I couldn't print it or something. Especially given this comment from the maa.org site: "Macintosh users MUST install [Adobe Acrobat] Reader on their computer to use this CD."

Good news. No DRM. I was able to load the files using Preview on the mac, but they didn't perform all that well. Not that that matters. The books are basically scans, as near as I can tell. The books perform as well (or not) under Adobe Reader 8.0.0. No problems printing. You can also copy/paste the text out, which is interesting; the books are basically scans, as I said, so someone did some OCR work on them as well.

What I've been doing is printing an article out every day for reading on my walk, or when I go to the ... um ... reading room.

Love it! Fond memories from when I used to read these in SciAm; these were the primary reason I read SciAm in the first place.

Millions of people around the world have had their interest in mathematics lit, kindled or fed by the writings of Martin Gardner. His regular column "Mathematical Recreations" appeared in "Scientific American" for over a quarter of a century and those articles were readable, entertaining and highly educational.
This CD-ROM is a collection of all his articles organized according to the book in which they appeared. The books are:

*) Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions
*) The Second Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions
*) New Mathematical Diversions
*) The Unexpected Hanging and Other Mathematical Diversions
*) Martin Gardner's 6th Book of Mathematical Diversions from Scientific American
*) Mathematical Carnival
*) Mathematical Magic Show
*) Mathematical Circus
*) The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix
*) Wheels, Life and Other Mathematical Amusements
*) Knotted Doughnuts and Other Mathematical Bewilderments
*) Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers . . . And the Return of Dr. Matrix
*) Fractal Music, Hypercards and More . . .
*) The Last Recreations: Hydras, Eggs, and Other Mathematical Mystifications

The opening page displays icons of all of the books and clicking on any icon switches the display to a split screen where the left section contains the table of contents and the right contains the text of the book. Clicking on any entry in the TOC takes you to that article. The collection is searchable, so if you have only a dim recollection of an article you read years ago, you will still be able to find it.
Martin Gardner is a very humble man, arguing that his skill in mathematical exposition is due to the fact that he does not know very much mathematics. He claims that this forced him to research his subject thoroughly before he began writing the article. I find this the only questionable position that he has ever taken; in my opinion the man is a mathematical genius.

I put this item in my "to buy" list the moment I heard about it, though I didn't actually purchase it until a couple months ago. Why did I wait so long!? This is an excellent set. All the books are here. The text is easy to read. It comes with an interview with Martin Gardner. If you have any interest in mathematics or mathematical puzzles this collection is a must have.

Martin Gardner has written very entertaining and engaging books about an incredibly wide variety of mathematical worlds and puzzles, and in the process made complex mathematical ideas come to life. This CD features 15 of his books in pdf form. The pdf files consist of page scans, which makes the pdf scroll a little slowly, but that isn't much of a problem.

I highly recommend this to anybody interested in recreational mathematics.

It's always a pleasure to read anything by Martin Gardner. By getting his works on disk, I can have them on my laptop - much easier than books. The only reason I give this collection 4 instead of 5 stars is that I would have liked the books to be in a more searchable format than PDFs - a minor complaint.

A lot of the puzzles were new to me and I sincerely enjoyed exploring areas in the mathemnatical games, that I was not familiar with.

I just accidentally ran across this product when looking for a replacement copy of Gardner's book on fractal music. How delighted I was to find this complete collection of Gardner's works for Scientific American on CD! The Mathematical Association of America that makes this CD apparently doesn't fully appreciate the value of Gardner's work though. Their own review on this product states "I can't think of a better present for a clever 12 year-old, bored undergraduate, restless retiree, or stay-at-home parent". To me, this is somewhat insulting to both Gardner's publications and the individual components of the potential audience that they point out. You would think by that statement that you are getting DVD sets of Bugs Bunny cartoons instead of the priceless gems contained in these publications. I bring this up just in case you run across this description too and get the wrong idea. All of the people mentioned above will enjoy this book, but not for the reasons implied.

Gardner makes math fun, but he doesn't trade depth for amusement. There is some serious math in each of his works, but even his most complex puzzles and chapters can be appreciated and enjoyed by people lacking advanced mathematics backgrounds. Besides the fun of experiencing math from the author's standpoint, there is considerable food for thought that can be the beginning of interesting programming projects, particularly in the realms of graphics and computer music. If you enjoy joining programming with mathematics as I do, Gardner's works are great idea books.

Note that Gardner has written numerous books besides those included in this CD since he left Scientific American. Some of them are on mathematics and puzzles as these works are, but he also has written quite a few essays on pseudoscience, philosophy, and other varied subjects, all using his trademark wit. You might want to check them out.

This cd is a compilation of every article that martin gardner wrote. If you enjoy math you will enjoy this product.

Those of us old enough to remember Martin Gardner's columns in Scientific American should buy this CD at least for old times sake. All the favourite characters like Dr Matrix and his daughter are there and it brings back many happy memories of trying to work out some of the problems Martin posed