{"id":172,"date":"2009-10-20T04:25:28","date_gmt":"2009-10-20T09:25:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/10\/20\/martin-gardner-et-al\/"},"modified":"2009-10-20T04:25:28","modified_gmt":"2009-10-20T09:25:28","slug":"martin-gardner-et-al","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/10\/20\/martin-gardner-et-al\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Gardner et al."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Tierney <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/10\/20\/science\/20tier.html?_r=1\">writes about Martin Gardner<\/a>, the great mathematical-puzzle writer.\u00a0 I went through a huge Martin Gardner phase in my misspent youth, as I suspect did many other scientists and mathematicians.<\/p>\n<p>Gardner&#8217;s best known for his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.\u00a0 When he stopped writing it in the early 1980s, the slot was taken over by Douglas Hofstadter.\u00a0 I loved Hofstadter&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach\">G\u00c3\u00b6del, Escher, Bach<\/a> (again, probably lots of scientists, especially those about my age, would say the same), but I don&#8217;t remember liking his column at all.<\/p>\n<p>As long as I&#8217;m free-associating here, there&#8217;s one more author of puzzle books that I remember loving when I was a kid: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Raymond_Smullyan\">Raymond Smullyan<\/a>.\u00a0 He&#8217;s an actual academic mathematician (unlike Gardner), but I know him only as the writer of logic puzzles.\u00a0 See, for example, the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_hardest_logic_puzzle_ever\">Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever<\/a>.\u00a0 For those who went through a Smullyanesque logic puzzle phase and remember some of the tricks, this puzzle is hard but doable.\u00a0 If you didn&#8217;t, then yes, it&#8217;s probably extremely hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Tierney writes about Martin Gardner, the great mathematical-puzzle writer.\u00a0 I went through a huge Martin Gardner phase in my misspent youth, as I suspect did many other scientists and mathematicians. Gardner&#8217;s best known for his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.\u00a0 When he stopped writing it in the early 1980s, the slot was taken &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/10\/20\/martin-gardner-et-al\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Martin Gardner et al.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}