Posted on 06/10/2005 7:22:08 PM PDT by snarks_when_bored
The interview also touches on a variety of significant topics that have been discussed on FR threads, for example, mathematical Platonism, and creationism.
What I've posted is a fairly straightforward HTML hack-by-hand of the PDF-format interview available on the American Mathematical Society website:
"Interview with Martin Gardner" (PDF-format only)
I recommend downloading the PDF file for the superb illustrations.
Ping
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One of the best reads I've had here in a few days , Thanks!
Thanks for posting this. I adore Martin Gardner -- I learned a tremendous amount from him.
There was a period in which I was doubtful about the theory of evolution, mainly because of reading a crank book called The New Geology, by a creationist named George McCready Price. His attack on evolution was fairly sophisticated. He was a Seventh Day Adventist who believed that the fossils were remnants of life that perished at the time of the flood. He argued that the theory of evolution is largely based on the fact that when you consider the fossils in the different strata, you find very simple forms in the older strata, and then as you get into younger and younger strata, you get more complicated forms. But, he said, this is circular reasoning, because the way they date the beds is by the type of fossils they contain. So his New Geology is filled with photographs of places where the fossils are in the wrong order: you find the complicated fossils in the lower beds and the simpler fossils in the higher beds. What he didn’t realize is that these “upside- down” fossils are due to folding of the strata or cleavage along a fault line. But if you don’t know this fact, his arguments are quite strong. It was not until I took courses in geology at the University of Chicago that I understood where Price went wrong. His book is one of the great crank works of all time. Modern creationists are still citing it and recommending it—sometimes without giving him credit!
Priceless!
I was really stunned by the number of well-known people Gardner has encountered in his life. Donald Knuth and John Conway as friends and houseguests? Whoa. And, you're right, those personal details are fascinating.
"But I didn’t take any math. My knowledge of math is at a very low level. I go up to calculus, and beyond that I don’t understand any of the papers that are being written. "
I am stunned by this.
"Priceless!" Good 'un! (I enjoyed that passage, too.)
"But I didn’t take any math. My knowledge of math is at a very low level. I go up to calculus, and beyond that I don’t understand any of the papers that are being written. "I am stunned by this.
Isaac Asimov made a similar admission.
Me too. I attempted the puzzlers in SA a few times and was convinced that the author was a mathematical genius.
I have some e-mails that Mr. Gardner sent to me, when he was doing some research on another person by the name of May (totally unrelated). Not quite the same as a letter with a signature, but I printed them out for posterity anyway.
-ccm
Great stuff, thanks! Martin Gardner is truly a national treasure.
Fascinating.
An enjoyable read. Thank you for the ping.
I believe John Horton Conway was introduced to a wide public through Gardner's Mathematical Games column in about 1970 or perhaps 1971, when Conway's Game of Life became a fad among the belt-mounted slide-rule-holster set. The Game of Life was a big, big influence on me, functioning to some extent to put me on the life path I've pursued to this day.
I vaguely remember a column or two about Knuth.
Three or four times a year Gardner would write devote a column to the adventures of Dr. Irving Joshua Matrix and his beautiful Amerasian daughter Iva. These he would write in the first person, mostly so he could personally enjoy the flirtations of Iva, who was always just out of reach.
(steely)
Thanks for the ping!
Thank you for the excellent article.
>The second article I sold them was on hexaflexagons. They had been invented by a group of graduate students at Princeton, including, of all people, Richard Feynman.
>Fascinating.
Feynmann's interest in flexagons, specifically "hexahexaflexagons," is described in James Gleick's biography of Feynmann, "Genius".
I enjoyed these letters to the editor, published in Scientific American in March and May of 1957, in response to Gardner's piece on flexagons. The first is reprinted in Gleick's book, where I first encountered it.
_____
SIRS:
I was quite taken with the article entitled "Flexagons" in your December issue. It took us only six or seven hours to paste the hexahexaflexagon together in the proper configuration. Since then it has been a source of continuing wonder. but we have a problem. This morning one of our fellows was sitting flexing the hexahexaflexagon idly when the tip of his necktie became caught in the folds. With each successive flex, more of his tie vanished into the flexagon. With the sixth flexing he disappeared entirely."
We have been flexing the thing madly, and can find no trace of him, but we have located a sixteenth configuration of the hexahexaflexagon.
Here is our question: Does his widow drag workmen's compensation for the duration of his absence, or can we have him declared legally dead immediately? We await your advice.
Neil Uptegrove
Allen B. Du Mont Laboratories, Inc.
Clifton, N.J.
SIRS:
The letter in the March issue of your magazine complaining of the disappearance of a fellow from the Allen B. Du Mont Laboratories "down" a hexahexaflexagon, has solved a mystery for us.
One day, while idly flexing our latest hexahexaflexagon, we were confounded to find that it was producing a strip of multicoloured material. Further flexing of the hexahexaflexagon finally disgorged a gum-chewing stranger.
Unfortunately he was in a weak state and, owing to an apparent loss of memory, unable to give any account of how he came to be with us. His health has now been restored on our national diet of porridge, haggis and whiskey, and he has become quite a pet around the department, answering to the name of Eccles.
Our problem is, should we now return him and, if so, by what method? Unfortunately Eccles now cringes at the very sight of a hexahexaflexagon and absolutely refuses to "flex".
Robert M. Hill
The Royal Institute of Science and Technology
Glasgow, Scotland
_____
(Letters copied from here:
http://www.f.kth.se/~f96-lla/math.html )
Just try to find something with the same innocent humor and spirit of fun in today's politicized Scientific American.
Sad but true, I have been a reader since 1960 (about) I used to keep all the magazines, but of course the liberal cr*p that they publish sickens me. Now you can search the archives on the net, but I don't subscribe to the net service. I think every year about dumping the hardcopy subscription but I still find a few articles to be worth it. (But never the articles on global warming or social problems, they have the "Vision of the Anoited".)I do believe I remember the repartee you just posted. Thanks.
I have read "Genius" but the hexaflexagon subject slipped my memory. I never tire of articles by or about Richard Feynman.
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