R.I.P. Martin Gardner (1825-2010)

OK, he was only 95, just a kitten, really. But skepticism and critical thinking lost a true giant today, Martin Gardner. I knew about Martin Gardner long before I knew about Randi or Sagan, and I first encountered him at a gynecologist's office.

Let me explain.

My father is an OB/GYN, and he paid a lot of attention to the design of his office so that it would be comfortable for the patient. In college, when I worked in his office, I saw his routine. He'd knock on an exam room door, where a patient would be waiting. When the exam was done, the patient would be ushered into the office for the rest of the consultation. Sometimes, while my father saw other patients, the client would have a short wait in his office. Built into the front of his massive desk was a little bookshelf within easy reach of the patients' chairs, where he kept a couple of magazines and, for a time, a square red book called Aha! Gotcha: Paradoxes to Puzzle and Delight (1982).

This book totally fucking blew my eight-year old mind.

I stole it from my dad's office. It was populated with math puzzles like Zeno's paradox, the mind-benders that come out of time travel into the past and the future (I bet that's where I first encountered relativity), impossible objects, and thought experiments (Did you know if you start up a mountain path at 8:00AM and arrive at the summit at 8:00PM, spend the night up there and then start down the path at 8:00AM and arrive back at the bottom at 8:00PM, no matter how many breaks you take or different speeds you walk, you will pass one point on the trail at the exact same same time going down as you did going up? The thought experiment Gardner illustrated this with was to imagine going-down guy and going-up guy embarking at the same time. At some point, no matter the schedules, rests or sudden crazy sprints of the two hikers, at some point they will pass each other. Elegant.)

It wasn't just the text, which was always lucid, but it was also the goofy little illustrations that accompanied it. That book always stuck with me. I rediscovered him a few years ago, when I started paying attention to skeptical topics. I have two collections of his billions of articles (he was the mathemagician at Scientific American for...ever and a regular contributer a "Fringe Watcher" at Skeptical Inquirer for a second ever), Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? and Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?. There is an annual meeting in his honor every year in Atlanta, which was featured in a WSJ article last month. He was in no small way a prodigious polymath. I can't even count as high as the number of books he published!

Last year, one of the two most promising jobs I was in the running for up until the end was at the University of Oklahoma in Norman (I got the right job, I think). There were two reasons, besides employment, that I was pulling for that job: 1) I've lived in tornado alley my entire life and still haven't seen a damned twister, and 2) Martin Gardner lived there.

The man stretched out my mind, and I have been trying to fill it ever since.

Phil Plait has picked up on the story, and Animala's sources on the JREF board have said that Randi had been dreading the announcement for a while, so it seems that he was perhaps not well lately.

Martin Gardner, you will be missed.

HJ