Martin Gardner: The Man Who Gave Life to Life
In 1956, a freelance writer with no mathematics degree walked into the offices of Scientific American with a piece about hexaflexagons — folded paper structures that had been invented by a bored Princeton graduate student in 1939 and had been passed quietly among mathematicians ever since. The editor, Gerard Piel, published the piece in December 1956. Readers loved it so much that he asked the writer, Martin Gardner, to come back next month with something similar.
Gardner came back for 288 consecutive months.
By the time he retired from the column in 1981, Gardner had done something no one before or since has managed: he had made recreational mathematics a serious intellectual pursuit, conducted in public, before an audience of hundreds of thousands, at the exact moment when the field’s greatest discoveries were being made. He did not make those discoveries. But he understood them — which turns out to have been just as important.
A Philosopher Who Became Mathematics
Martin Gardner was born on October 21, 1914, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a petroleum geologist father and a Montessori-trained teacher mother. He was intellectually voracious from the beginning, drawn to magic tricks, puzzles, and paradoxes — things that seemed one way until they were revealed to be another.
He enrolled at the University of Chicago intending to study physics, but philosophy seduced him instead. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1936, having developed what would become the central intellectual commitment of his life: the conviction that rigor and play were not opposites. Philosophy, at its best, was a game. Mathematics, it turned out, was the best game of all.
After the Second World War, Gardner worked as a freelance writer in New York, contributing to Esquire and later to Humpty Dumpty magazine, where he wrote children’s puzzles. He was not living in the mathematical world. He was an interested outsider who happened to write clearly.
The hexaflexagon piece changed everything. It was not a review of existing knowledge — it was a genuine investigation, written by someone who had tracked down the original inventors (Arthur Stone, Richard Feynman, John Tukey, and Bryant Tuckerman, who had worked on the structures as Princeton students), understood the mathematics, and found a way to make it both precise and delightful. Piel recognized that Gardner had a rare gift: he could explain hard things without making them soft.
The Column
Mathematical Games ran in Scientific American from January 1957 through December 1980, followed by nine more columns through June 1986 — 297 columns in total. Over this period, Gardner wrote about hexaflexagons and magic squares, combinatorics and topology, logic puzzles and number theory, game theory and cryptography. He wrote about knots. He wrote about impossible figures. He wrote about the mathematics of music and the mathematics of poetry.
What made the column unique was not its subject matter — it was its position in the ecosystem. Scientific American in the 1960s and 1970s was not a popular magazine that happened to cover science. It was an intellectually serious publication read by the professional class of researchers, engineers, professors, and technically trained laypeople. Its circulation in this period was somewhere north of 300,000 subscribers — large enough to constitute a genuine community, specialized enough that the community was actually interested.
Gardner was the one place in that community where a research mathematician and a curious high school student were reading the same thing. His column crossed an audience that had no other common ground.
He also had a practice that turned the column into something more than a column: he answered his mail. Copious, meticulous correspondence — conducted by postcard and telephone, filed on index cards, eventually filling 63 linear feet of archival boxes at Stanford University. Readers who wrote in with solutions, corrections, or new problems received replies. Problems got passed along to relevant experts. Experts wrote back with new problems, which became columns. The column was the visible output of an invisible network.
The mathematician Doris Schattschneider called this network “Gardner’s mathematical grapevine” — a dense correspondence web that connected professional mathematicians with amateurs, and amateurs with each other, through a single central node. Gardner knew everyone who was doing interesting mathematics, and everyone who was doing interesting mathematics knew Gardner.
What He Actually Did
The standard account of Gardner’s influence describes him as a popularizer — someone who took difficult mathematical ideas and made them accessible to a general audience. This is true, but it misses the more important half of the story.
Gardner was not just explaining ideas to outsiders. He was selecting which ideas mattered, at a moment when the field itself had not yet decided. His columns on Solomon Golomb’s polyominos (published in 1957, when Golomb’s work was barely known) helped establish polyominos as a legitimate area of study. His January 1977 column on Penrose tiles — the aperiodic tiling patterns that Roger Penrose had only recently worked out — appeared on the cover of Scientific American and introduced quasi-crystalline geometry to an audience that included the physicists who would, in subsequent years, discover actual quasi-crystals in nature. His August 1977 column on public-key cryptography, titled “A new kind of cipher that would take millions of years to break,” introduced the RSA algorithm to the world outside a handful of MIT offices, six years before it was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Gardner did not choose topics because they were already famous. He chose them because he thought they were important, and then they became famous.
His collaborations also created collaborations. Berlekamp, Conway, and Guy — three mathematicians who met and worked together partly through Gardner’s connective influence — wrote Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, one of the foundational texts of combinatorial game theory. Gardner introduced Doris Schattschneider to the amateur mathematician Marjorie Rice; together they documented a series of newly discovered pentagon tilings. The network was generative, not merely informational.
As the mathematician Ron Graham, who worked with Gardner for decades, put it: “Martin was very good at giving attribution. That inspired people to work on problems.”
October 1970
In the autumn of 1970, a Cambridge mathematician named John Horton Conway sent a description of a game he had been playing on a Go board to Gardner. Conway had been working for some time on the problem of finding the simplest possible rules for a two-dimensional cellular automaton that could produce genuinely complex, unpredictable behavior. He had tried hundreds of rule sets. The one he settled on — birth on exactly three neighbors, survival on two or three — was elegant, simple, and astonishing in its behavior.
Gardner recognized what he had before he finished reading. He wrote the column in October 1970. Its title was “The fantastic combinations of John Conway’s new solitaire game ‘life’.”
The article was four pages. It explained the rules. It showed several starting patterns. It described a few known behaviors — stable configurations, oscillators, the five-cell pattern called the R-pentomino that Conway had watched churn unpredictably for dozens of generations without stabilizing. And it posed a challenge: Conway had conjectured that no pattern could grow without bound, but he was not certain. Gardner offered a $50 prize, in Conway’s name, to the first person who could prove or disprove the conjecture before the end of 1970.
The response was unlike anything Gardner had seen in nearly fifteen years of writing the column.
Letters arrived by the hundreds. Readers with access to mainframe computers — in 1970, this was a relatively small number, but a highly concentrated one, clustered in universities and research institutions — began programming Life and running it for generations, reporting their results. Bill Gosper at MIT, perhaps the most gifted computational mathematician of his generation, set his team at the MIT AI Lab to work on it. In November — within weeks of the column’s publication — Gosper’s team discovered the glider gun: a configuration that oscillates and periodically emits gliders, growing without bound. The $50 prize was claimed. The conjecture was false.
Gardner followed up with a second Life column in February 1971, reporting the discoveries. He would return to Life several more times over the following decade. He later identified it as one of the five columns that generated the most reader response of any he had written — alongside polyominos, Newcomb’s paradox, Penrose tiles, and the RSA cipher column.
He also noted, simply: “The column made Conway an instant celebrity. The game was written up in Time.”
The Mechanism of Influence
What Gardner did with the Life column illustrates a mechanism of influence that he exercised repeatedly throughout his career, and that has no good modern equivalent.
Scientific American in 1970 was read by people in different fields who shared very little intellectual common ground. A molecular biologist in California and a computer scientist in Massachusetts and a philosopher in New York and a high school student in Ohio were all reading the same magazine, but they were not reading each other’s journals. Gardner’s column was the one page in the magazine that reached all of them, with material that was simultaneously rigorous and accessible.
When he wrote about Life, he was not just informing mathematicians about a new recreational puzzle. He was placing a fundamentally important idea — emergence, complexity, computation as a physical phenomenon — in front of an audience that included many of the people who would go on to do the most important work of their careers thinking about exactly those questions. The biologists who went on to model morphogenesis with cellular automata. The physicists who argued that the universe might itself be a computational system. The computer scientists who built the field of artificial life. Many of them encountered these ideas for the first time on a page of Scientific American, written by a man with a philosophy degree and a lifelong fondness for puzzles.
Persi Diaconis, the mathematician and statistician who first met Gardner when he was a thirteen-year-old amateur magician, put it this way: “Martin Gardner has turned dozens of innocent youngsters into math professors and thousands of math professors into innocent youngsters.”
The quote is funny, and it is also precise. Gardner had two audiences, and he served both of them with the same column: the newcomers who had not yet found mathematics, and the professionals who had forgotten it could be joyful. Both were necessary. The newcomers became the researchers. The researchers remembered why the work mattered.
After the Column
Gardner retired from Scientific American in 1981. The column was replaced by Douglas Hofstadter’s “Metamagical Themas” — a name that is an anagram of “Mathematical Games,” chosen as an explicit tribute. Gardner continued writing: he published more than a hundred books in his lifetime, on mathematics, magic, philosophy, and literary criticism. He was a fierce defender of scientific skepticism and rationalism, and wrote extensively about pseudoscience and the paranormal.
In 1993, the mathematician and puzzle collector Tom Rodgers organized the first “Gathering 4 Gardner” in Atlanta — a biennial conference dedicated to the recreational mathematics, puzzles, and magic that Gardner had championed. The conference continues today, held every two years, drawing hundreds of mathematicians, magicians, and puzzle designers from around the world.
Gardner published his final piece for Scientific American in August 1998 — “A Quarter Century of Recreational Mathematics,” a retrospective on the columns he found most significant. He was eighty-three years old, and still asking readers to think carefully about problems that were harder than they looked.
His wife Charlotte died in 2000. Two years later, Gardner moved from New York to Norman, Oklahoma, to be near his son. He continued writing, receiving visitors, and corresponding until near the end.
Martin Gardner died on May 22, 2010, at the age of ninety-five.
What He Left Behind
Gardner’s archives at Stanford University comprise 63 linear feet of correspondence, notes, and manuscripts — the material record of a career spent building bridges between professional mathematics and the curious public. The archive spans 1957 to 1997 and includes letters from Conway, Penrose, Golomb, Shannon, and hundreds of others.
His fifteen published collections of Mathematical Games columns remain in print. His influence on the mathematicians who grew up reading him is almost impossible to overstate, because it is diffuse and personal and rarely appears as a formal citation. It shows up instead in acknowledgments, in anecdotes at conferences, in the way certain mathematicians describe their first encounter with the subject — not in a classroom, not in a textbook, but in a magazine, reading about a man folding paper or arranging counters on a grid.
The Game of Life would have existed without Gardner. Conway invented it, and Conway’s work would eventually have found its audience. But the specific history — the October 1970 column, the thousands of readers, the letter-writing, the MIT team, the glider gun discovered within weeks, the community that formed almost instantly around a game that had not existed two months before — that history required someone who was reading the right thing at the right time and knew how to tell it to everyone else.
Gardner was that person. He spent twenty-five years being that person. It was, in the end, the most important mathematical contribution of the twentieth century that was not mathematics.