[21][22] His fascination with mathematics started in his boyhood when his father gave him a copy of Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks and Conundrums.

[23][24] He attended the University of Chicago where he studied history, literature and sciences under their intellectually-stimulating Great Books curriculum and earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1936.

[1] It ran from 1956 to 1981 with sporadic columns afterwards and was the first introduction of many subjects to a wider audience, notably:[37] Gardner had problems learning calculus and never took a mathematics course after high school.

At a magic show in 1956 fellow magician Royal Vale Heath introduced Gardner to the intricately folded paper shapes known as flexagons and steered him to the four Princeton University professors who had invented and investigated their mathematical properties.

In 1981, on Gardner's retirement from Scientific American, the column was replaced by Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas", a name that is an anagram of "Mathematical Games".

[48][a][49][50][51][52][53] Gardner's admirers included such diverse individuals as W. H. Auden, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and the entire French literary group known as the Oulipo.

[57] David Auerbach wrote: "A case can be made, in purely practical terms, for Martin Gardner as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

[63][64][65] Noam Chomsky once wrote, "Martin Gardner's contribution to contemporary intellectual culture is unique – in its range, its insight, and understanding of hard questions that matter.

In addition to introducing many first-rate puzzles and topics such as Penrose tiles[67] and Conway's Game of Life,[68] he was equally adept at writing columns about traditional mathematical topics such as knot theory, Fibonacci numbers, Pascal's triangle, the Möbius strip, transfinite numbers, four-dimensional space, Zeno's paradoxes, Fermat's Last Theorem, and the four-color problem.

[35][81] Gardner's network was also responsible for introducing Doris Schattschneider and Marjorie Rice, who worked together to document the newly discovered pentagon tilings.

"[76] Gardner prepared each of his columns in a painstaking and scholarly fashion and conducted copious correspondence to be sure that everything was fact-checked for mathematical accuracy.

[85] This correspondence led to columns about the rep-tiles and pentominos of Solomon W. Golomb; the space filling curves of Bill Gosper;[86] the aperiodic tiles of Roger Penrose; the Game of Life invented by John H. Conway; the superellipse and the Soma cube of Piet Hein; the trapdoor functions of Diffie, Hellman, and Merkle; the flexagons of Stone, Tuckerman, Feynman, and Tukey; the geometrical delights in a book by H. S. M. Coxeter; the game of Hex invented by Piet Hein and John Nash; Tutte's account of squaring the square; and many other topics.

The wide array of mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, philosophers, magicians, artists, writers, and other influential thinkers who can be counted as part of Gardner's mathematical grapevine includes:[76][87][69][88][89][54][90][51][75] These new ciphers are not absolutely unbreakable in the sense of the one-time pad.

[91] In his August 1977 column, "A new kind of cipher that would take millions of years to break", Gardner described a new cryptographic system invented by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman.

[91] In the end the defense establishment could provide no legal basis for suppressing the new technology, and when a detailed paper about RSA was published in Communications of the ACM,[97] the NSA’s crypto monopoly was effectively terminated.

[25] In a review of Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, Stephen Jay Gould called Gardner "The Quack Detector", a writer who "expunge[d] nonsense" and in so doing had "become a priceless national resource.

Intellectuals including astronomer Carl Sagan, author and biochemist Isaac Asimov, psychologist B. F. Skinner, and journalist Philip J. Klass became fellows of the program.

His targets included not just safe subjects like astrology and UFO sightings, but more vigorously defended topics such as chiropractic, vegetarianism, creationism, Scientology, the Laffer Curve, and Christian Science.

[111] Gardner's first published writing (at the age of fifteen) was a magic trick in The Sphinx, the official magazine of the Society of American Magicians.

[116] These included William Simon who introduced Gardner to Charlotte Greenwald, whom he married in 1952, Dai Vernon, Jerry Andrus, statistician Persi Diaconis, and polymath Raymond Smullyan.

[122] At the same time, he was skeptical of claims that any god has communicated with human beings through spoken or telepathic revelation or through miracles in the natural world.

[124] Gardner wrote repeatedly about what public figures such as Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and William F. Buckley, Jr. believed and whether their beliefs were logically consistent.

[122] Gardner said that he suspected that the fundamental nature of human consciousness may not be knowable or discoverable unless perhaps a physics more profound than ("underlying") quantum mechanics is someday developed.

[131][132] Gardner himself went on to produce annotated editions of G. K. Chesterton's The Innocence Of Father Brown and The Man Who Was Thursday, as well as of celebrated poems including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Casey at the Bat, The Night Before Christmas, and The Hunting of the Snark.

[89] He took the title from a poem, a so-called grook, by his good friend Piet Hein,[135] which perfectly expresses Gardner's abiding sense of mystery and wonder about existence.

Gardner was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers.

So far, though, movement in this direction has been glacial.He recalls how as a young boy a math teacher had scolded him for working on a bit of recreational mathematics and laments at how wrongheaded this attitude is.

They scribble their hieroglyphics on the back of a menu and men go to the moon, harness the atom, crack the genetic code, transform the planet's face.The numerous awards Gardner received include:[148] The Mathematical Association of America has established a Martin Gardner Lecture to be given each year on the last day of MAA MathFest, the summer meeting of the MAA.

The first annual lecture, Recreational Mathematics and Computer Science: Martin Gardner's Influence on Research, was given by Erik Demaine of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Saturday, August 3, 2019, at MathFest in Cincinnati.

[165] All Gardner's works were non-fiction except for two novels – The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973) and Visitors from Oz (1998) – and two collections of short pieces – The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix (1967, 1985) and The No-Sided Professor (1987).