Sunday, May 23, 2010

Martin Gardner 1914--2010

Martin Gardner, the author of Mathematical Games in Scientific American died yesterday at age 95.

When I was in high school, during my senior year I ended up with an hour to spend in the library every day.  Among other things I loved reading Scientific American and I particularly looked forward to Gardner's Mathematical Games column each month.

There are some games he featured there that I still remember to this day.  There were some variants of Nim including one called Chomp.  He also introduced me to Robert Abbott's New Eleusis (a few years later) which I still enjoy teaching people and playing from time to time.