Customer Reviews

The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler: A Collection in Tribute to Martin Gardner

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The late Paul Erdos was widely known as a disseminator of mathematics, and yet his impact on the progress of mathematics may not match that of Martin Gardner. For twenty-five years, he wrote a regular column on "Mathematical Games" for Scientific American and other articles have appeared in many other venues since his "retirement" from SA in 1982. Personally, it is a very rare occasion when I encounter an American mathematician who was not strongly influenced by reading something by Gardner. Many, like myself, read it religiously, considering it the high point of each issue. It is hard to underestimate the number of people who were steered towards a career in mathematics by Gardner or had their interest increased by reading one or more of his papers.
In 1993, the first gathering for Gardner (G4G1) was held in Atlanta, where he was honored for all of his work in making mathematics interesting and entertaining. As befits a gathering of this type, many people wrote papers in the areas of magic, puzzles and mathematics to be presented at the conference. Those papers, plus a few that didn't make it into the official list, have been gathered together to make this book.
The papers are split into three categories: Personal Magic, Puzzlers and Mathemagics. While none were authored by the master, they all clearly bear his stylistic signature. The presentation is clear, entertaining and all reach the point quickly and effectively. I was so intrigued by them that it was the only thing that I read once I obtained a copy, to the detriment of the quality of a lecture on the programming language Java.
This is the highest tribute that any professional writer can achieve, when others are motivated to write material similar to yours to be collected and presented at a conference in your honor. Gardner deserves that and more and every paper in this collection is comparable to his work in quality.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

The puzzles of Gardiner (and others) took the edge off the pain of loneliness that is the inevitable result of being an extremely literate but physically uncoordinated kid. As I began to integrate with the "normal" kids, I discovered that my love for these puzzles was not unique; what was different about me was merely the respective age at which we became able to appreciate them (read: "to actually solve a few of them").

Here is my puzzle for you: This book is (at this writing) available as a PDF download from the publisher. And it's free! You should be able to find it without much difficulty (if the offer is still good when you read this). The only clue I will give you is "the numeral one followed by a hundred zeros, misspelled."

A interesting book: I appreciated above all the classification of puzzles of J.Dagelty & E.Hordern. I should like better that more contributions would have had a bibliography like the Diophantine Recreations of David Singmaster.