In Memoriam Martin Gardner 1914-2010

It was with considerable sadness I read about the passing of Martin Gardner.  Among his many accomplishments many of us remember him as the author of the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American for 25 years starting before I was born.

I am hardly unique among math PhD's who owe in some way my inspiration for joining the field on his columns.  My father was a great fan and he and I pored over each article.  We folded flexagons, and my father wrote an early computer program to simulate Conway's Game of Life, an early cellular automaton. When Martin wrote his article on trap door ciphers, my father and I wrote to MIT to get a copy of Rivest, Shamir and Adelman's paper, at the time the first mathematical reprint I had ever seen.

In middle school I based two science fair projects on material I gleaned from Martin's columns.  The first was a project on the subject of topology and the second was about the Platonic and Archimedean solids.  Apart from the technical content, it was a good example of father-son collaboration.  For the latter project we worked the paper cutter as an assembly line helping me mass produce equilateral triangles, squares and pentagons as well as a few more exotic shapes.

Of all the topics exposed by Martin, my favorite was always his expositions on topology.  He mentioned in these articles that topology was full of theorems that were easy to state and hard to prove  Topologists also had a knack for catchy names for theorems such as the "Pancake Theorem", the "Ham Sandwich Theorem" and the admonition that "You can't comb the hair on a billiard ball."

I pursued the study of topology among other topics throughout my undergraduate years and into graduate school although I eventually detoured into other branches of mathematics such as algebraic geometry and eventually dynamical systems theory.  The aforementioned theorems among other more general principles gave me my first glimpse of the  difference between a result being "deep" and merely "complicated".  In many ways this depth has informed my outlook on how the universe works and for that I thank Martin.