Hadden Adam en Eva navels? Martin Gardner kan het niet meer zeggen

[Cees Binkhorst]

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Martin Gardner, Puzzler and Polymath, Dies at 95
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/us/24gardner.html
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: May 23, 2010

Martin Gardner, who teased brains with math puzzles in Scientific
American for a quarter-century and who indulged his own restless
curiosity by writing more than 70 books on topics as diverse as magic,
philosophy and the nuances of Alice in Wonderland, died Saturday in
Norman, Okla. He was 95.
Enlarge This Image
Colm Mulcahy

Martin Gardner was a prolific and wide-ranging writer.

He had been living in an assisted-living facility in Norman, his son
James said in confirming the death.

Mr. Gardner also wrote fiction, poetry, literary and film criticism, as
well as puzzle books. He was a leading voice in refuting
pseudoscientific theories, from ESP to flying saucers. He was so
prolific and wide-ranging in his interests that critics speculated that
there just had to be more than one of him.

His mathematical writings intrigued a generation of mathematicians, but
he never took a college math course. If it seemed the only thing this
polymath could not do was play music on a saw, rest assured that he
could, and quite well.

“Martin Gardner is one of the great intellects produced in this country
in the 20th century,” said Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist.

W. H. Auden, Arthur C. Clarke, Jacob Bronowski, Stephen Jay Gould and
Carl Sagan were admirers of Mr. Gardner. Vladimir Nabokov mentioned him
in his novel “Ada” as “an invented philosopher.” An asteroid is named
for him.

Mr. Gardner responded that his life was not all that interesting,
really. “It’s lived mainly inside my brain,” he told The Charlotte
Observer in 1993.

His was a clarifying intelligence: he said his talent was asking good
questions and transmitting the answers clearly and crisply. In
“Annotated Alice” (1960), Mr. Gardner literally rained on the parade of
his hero, Lewis Carroll.

Carroll writes of a “golden afternoon” in the first line of “Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland,” a reference to an actual day rowing on the
Thames. Mr. Gardner found that the day, July 4, 1862, was, in truth,
“cool and rather wet.”

Mr. Gardner’s questions were often mathematical. What is special about
the number 8,549,176,320? As Mr. Gardner explained in “The Incredible
Dr. Matrix” (1976), the number is the 10 natural integers arranged in
English alphabetical order.

The title of a book he published in 2000 was calculated to tweak
religious fundamentalists — “Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?” — suggesting
that the first man and woman had had umbilical cords. This time he gave
no answer.

“Gardner has an old-fashioned, almost 19th-century, Oliver Wendell
Holmes kind of American mind — self-educated, opinionated, cranky and
utterly unafraid of embarrassment,” Adam Gopnik wrote in The New York
Times Book Review in 1999.

Martin Gardner was born Oct. 21, 1914, in Tulsa, Okla., where his
father, a petroleum geologist, started an oil company. As a boy he liked
magic tricks, chess, science and collecting mechanical puzzles.

Unbeknownst to his mother at the time, he learned to read by looking at
the words on the page as she read him L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. As an
adult, he wrote a sequel to Baum’s “Wonderful Wizard of Oz” called
“Visitors From Oz,” in which Dorothy encounters characters from the
“Alice” books and Geraldo Rivera.

Mr. Gardner majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago, from
which he graduated in 1936. In 1937 he returned to Oklahoma to be
assistant oil editor of The Tulsa Tribune at $15 a week. Quickly bored,
he returned to the University of Chicago, where he worked in press
relations and moonlighted selling magic kits.

He joined the Navy and served on a destroyer. While doing night watch
duty, he thought up crazy plots for stories, including “The Horse on the
Escalator,” which he sold to Esquire magazine.

After a stint as editor of Humpty Dumpty, a children’s magazine, Mr.
Gardner began a long relationship with Scientific American with an
article in 1956 on hexaflexagons, strips of paper that can be folded in
certain ways to reveal faces besides the two that were originally on the
front and back. When the publisher suggested that he write a column
about mathematical games, he jumped at the chance.

By his account, Mr. Gardner then rushed out to secondhand bookstores to
find books about math puzzles, an approach he used for years to keep
just ahead of his monthly deadline. “The number of puzzles I’ve invented
you can count on your fingers,” he told The Times last year.

Dr. Hofstadter, who succeeded Mr. Gardner at Scientific American, said
Mr. Gardner achieved elegant results by drawing on fields from logic to
the philosophy of science to literature. He conveyed “the magical
quality of mathematics,” Dr. Hofstadter said.

Mr. Gardner, who lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., for most of the
years he wrote for Scientific American, resigned from the magazine in
1981. Two years later he began a column in Skeptical Inquirer, “Notes of
a Fringe Watcher,” which he continued to write until 2002. He had
already begun beating this drum, debunking psuedoscience, in his book
“Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.” He helped found the
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

In The New York Review of Books in 1982, Stephen Jay Gould, the
evolutionary biologist, called Mr. Gardner “the single brightest beacon
defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and
anti-intellectualism that surround us.”

There was much more, including his annotated editions of “Casey at the
Bat” and “The Night Before Christmas.” In his philosophical writing Mr.
Gardner rejected speculative metaphysics because it could not be proved
logically or empirically. He wrestled with religion in essays and in a
novel that described his personal journey from fundamentalism, “The
Flight of Peter Fromm” (1973). He ultimately found no reason to believe
in anything religious except a human desire to avoid “deep-seated
despair.” So, he said, he believed in God.

After retiring from Scientific American, Mr. Gardner lived for many
years in Hendersonville, N.C. His wife, the former Charlotte Greenwald,
died in 2000. Besides his son James, of Norman, he is survived by
another son, Thomas, of Asheville, N.C., and three grandchildren. For
all Mr. Gardner’s success in refuting those who take advantage of
people’s gullibility, he sometimes could not help having fun with it
himself. In one Scientific American column, he wrote that dwelling in
pyramids could increase everything from intelligence to sexual prowess.
In another he asked readers to remember the holiday that begins the
month of April.

“I just play all the time,” he said in an interview with Skeptical
Inquirer in 1998, “and am fortunate enough to get paid for it.”

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