22 May 2010

Martin Gardner RIP

I don't remember where I found the copy of Knotted Doughnuts by Martin Gardner. A yard sale I suppose, or a second hand book store. I don't even remember when. Maybe junior high, maybe high school. I have no idea why I picked it up. The cover is so ugly, and I was never especially into mathematical puzzles.
 
But at some point I acquired the book, took it home and read it. I have no recollection of first reading it. I've read it many, many times since.
 
It's a collection of columns that he wrote for Scientific American called Mathematical Games. It's the 11th collection in the series. Despite being a column about mathematical diversions, it opens with an eye-opening review of the power of coincidence. Its closing essays are a scathing debunking of the I-Ching and other divination systems and then a scathing attack on the Laffer Curve, pulled into this volume out of sequence so that it would appear in book form in 1986 when the arguments about that sort of thing were raging. In between there's topoplogy, a graph paper racing game, an extensive debunking of the idea that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare as part of a longer essay about cryptography, and an astounding graphical investigation of fractal-like programmable worm paths.
 
I pulled all of those topics straight from memory.
 
The essays about coincidence, Shakespearean authorship theory, and the Laffer curve all had an especially powerful impact on me. They drove me to rethink how I looked at proof and evidence. They made me a more critically aware person, and I hope that I have stayed true to the spirit of healthy skepticism that they engendered. I still have my copy Knotted Doughnuts.
 
Martin Gardner died today and the world is poorer for his passing.