Martin Gardner\u27s 300th article for Scientific American appeared in their August, 1998 issue (Cover: New Thinking about Back Pain). It\u27s title  A Quarter-Century of Recreational Mathematics,  highlights Gardner\u27s 297  Mathematical Games  columns and his 1956 article on  Hexaflexagons  (he does not mention the 1952 article on  Logic -- see Collector\u27s Corner -- Round 4)

Farrell, Jeremiah

English

Martin Gardner wrote 111 puzzles for his good friend Isaac Asimov to include in Isaac\u27s Science Fiction magazine. The popular Sci-fi paperback is still being published. For details contact the editor Sheila Williams

Digital Commons @ Butler University

COLLECTOR'S CORNER, Round 6 An Occasional Item of Interest to Gardner Collectors Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine Suggested by Jeremiah FarreIl Martin Gardner wrote 1 11 puzzles for his good fiiend Isaac Asimov to include in Isaac's Science Fiction Magazine. This popular Sci-fi paperback is still being published. For details contact the editor Sheila Williams swilliamsG),dellmaeazines.net . Many of Gardner's columns are collected in h s  books Science Fiction Puzzle Tales, 1981, Random House Value Publishng, and Puzzles From Other Worlds, 1984, Vintage Press. In the November, 1983 issue Gardner quotes this doggerel in his article "The Dybbuk and the Hexagram": I am obliged to plant a grove, To please the pretty girl I love, This curious grove I must compose Of nineteen trees in nine straight rows; And in each row, five trees must place, Or I may never see her face. Now, readers brave, I'm in no jest. Pray lend your aid and do your best. Assuming the lines of the diagram are unbroken by spots or numerals, can you discover the number.of triangles in the figure? The answer will be given later. We are privileged to have editor Sheila Williams comments about Gardner: Dear Jeremiah, My January 20 1 1 editorial for Asimov's is called "Martin Gardner. " Here's most of it: There were many reasons to be thrilled when I landed a job at Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. The first and most obvious was the chance to wo~k  along side Isaac Asimov- a man I'd admired since my childhood. A second, very important reason that I was doing 199my little happy dance, was that I would also get the chance to work with another childhood idol-Martin Gardner. I'd first fallen down the rabbit hole and into Martin Gardner's wonderful work with The Annotated Alice. In middle school and hgh school, I read and reread his notes about Alice, both in Wonderland and through the looking glass, and I've continued to dip into that book in all its various editions ever since. As a teenager, I avidly turned to Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American as soon as the magazine arrived in our mailbox. I'm sure it was an early exposure to his work in SA that led to my own life- long love of logic and math games. On some level, these essays may even have contributed to my decision to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. In one of life's circuitous routes, it was a fellow grad student who introduced me to Gardner's famous pseudoscience debunlung Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Once I got to know Martin, I subscribed to the Skeptical Enquirer, both because I found it an intriguing journal and because I wanted to keep up with h s  Notes of a Fringe Watcher column. "The Doctor's Dilemma" appeared in the inaugural issue of Asimov's. It was introduced briefly as "the first in a series of SF puzzles that Mr. Gardner has promised us." The series of puzzles took the form of short science fiction stories and lasted for more than nine years and one hundred and eleven columns. I was lucky enough to work on nearly half of them and I edited a little sixty-four page booklet of h s  puzzles that was used as a premium by our circulation department. The columns took us "Around the Solar System," escorted us along "The Road to Mandalay," and introduced us to "The Jinn from Hyperspace." They included correspondence with Paul Dirac and explored errors in William Goldman's Lord of the Flies. The columns could be challenging to run because they were often accompanied by complex images and because we had to find space at the bottom of several stories for all the solutions. They were a lot of fun, though, and I enjoyed worlung closely with Martin and shepherdng the puzzles through the production process. I was very disappointed when he called one spring day to let me know that he intended to retire from his duties as our columnist once "Thang the Planet Eater" appeared in our November 1986 issue. It was a very active retirement that saw the publication of at least thirty-five books. One of the last, The Jinn from Hyperspace: And Other Scribblings-both Serious and Whimsical (2007), showed that the little puzzle pieces in Asimov's were not lying fallow. Martin continued to write essays and books right up until h s  death last May at the age of ninety-five. His passing occurred just a month after the loss of Asimov's first editor, George H. Scithers. Both men deserve thanks for the magazine's firm foundation. Best wishes, Sheila Williams, editor Asimov's 200

Collector\u27s Corner, Round 6

COLLECTOR'S CORNER, Round 5 An Occasional Item of Interest to Gardner Collectors Scientific American Magazine Revisited Suggested by Jeremiah Farrell Martin Gardner's 300' article for Scienttfific American appeared in their August, 1998 issue (Cover: New Thnking about Back Pain). It's title "A Quarter-Century of Recreational Mathematics," highlights Gardner's 297 "Mathematical Games" columns and h s  1956 article on "Hexaflexagons" (he does not mention the 1952 article on "Logic - see Collector's Corner - Round 4). Gardner's good friend Solomon W. Golomb of the University of Southern California was one of the first to supply grist for "Mathematical Games". The May, 1957 issue (Cover: Birds In The Museum) introduced Golomb's studies of the immensely popular polyominoes, i.e. shapes formed by joining identical squares along their edges. The 2-square domino can take only one sha,p_e but the trwino, tetrornino, and pentomino can assume a variety of forms. "The study of polyominoes soon evolved into a flourishing branch of recreational mathematics," said Gardner. "Arthur C. Clarke, the science- fiction author, confessed he had become a 'pentomino addict' after he started playing with the deceptively simple figures." Golomb would contribute many more times, over the years. A simple tetromino problem for the reader. Can you prove that the five different tetrominos cannot cover exactly a 4x5 checker board? Gardner mentions several other multiple contributors including Denmark's Piet Hein and John H. C~nway of Primion. Conway's game of Life and Hein's game Hex are both still popular. One of Gardner's favorite columns was April 1975 (Cover: Dinosaur Renaissance) "Six sensational discoveries that somehow or another have escaped public attention." The article was an April Fool's Day hoax! It told readers that Leonardo da Vinci had invented the flush toilet, that opening pawn to Kiag's rook 4 was a certain chess winner, and supplied a complicatedmap purporting to require fjve colors to ensure that no two neighboring regions were colored the same. "Hundreds of readers sent me copies of the map colored with only four colors," reported Gardner. "Many said the task had taken days. - The juur-color.arrrp fi~cnrrnr i+ csplorled Every year or so Gardner would devote a column to the numerologist Dr. Irving Joshua Matrix (note the "666" provided by the number of letters in the first, middle and last names). There were 22 in all, starting in January, 1960 (Cover: not seen) and ending with Matnx' untimely "death" in the September, 1980 issue {Cover: Economlc Development). Hourever, Gardne~, in Perose Tiles to Trapdoor Czphers, 1989, Freeman, Qscovered that the reported "death" of Matrix was premature when he fomd the mysterious doctor in Casablanca. 197For a flavor of Matrix and his numerology we offer the following from the 1980 issue. An emirp is a prime that yields a different prime when it's digits are reversed (like 13 and 3 1). Leslie E. Card discovered these order 4 and order 5 emirp squares: and The order 4 square is unique save for rotations and reflections. Surprisingly often so-called recreational mathematics can lead to serious, applied mathematics. Gardner was first to report, in h s  August, 1977 (Cover: Kangaroos) column, "A new lund of cipher that would take millions of years to break," about an "unbreakable" code discovered by Ronald L. Rivest, Adj Sharnir, and Leonard Adleman, computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gardner notes that "it was the first of a series of ciphers that revolutionized the field of cryptology." We would be remiss if we did not mention the work of the remarkable Scott Kim that Gardner so much admired. Kim lwas Erst featured in -the June, 198 1 issue (Cover: Accretion of Planets) whme h s  "Inversions" were displayed. Gardner cites Kim's "magical ability to take just about any word or short phrase and letter it in such a way that i t  exhbits some land of s t r i h g  geometrical syrnmeQ." k recent exrrmpk: 198

Collector\u27s Corner, Round 5

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Collector\u27s Corner, Round 5

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