The Sciences
A Quarter Century of Recreational Mathematics, by Martin Gardner
Edit or's note: In light of the recent death of Martin Gardner, we are republishing this article from the August 1998 issue of Scientific American.
Stories by Martin Gardner
Tech
Is Beauty Truth and Truth Beauty?
How Keats's famous line applies to math and science
A Quarter-Century of Recreational Mathematics
The author of Scientific American's column "Mathematical Games" from 1956 to 1981 recounts 25 years of amusing puzzles and serious discoveries
Mathematical Games, June 1986
Casting a net on a checkerboard and other puzzles of the forest
Mathematical Games, September 1983
The topology of knots, plus the results of Douglas Hofstadter's Luring Lottery
Mathematical Games, August 1983
Tasks you cannot help finishing no matter how hard you try to block finishing them
Mathematical Games, December 1981
The Laffer curve and other laughs in current economics
Mathematical Games
Euclid's parallel postulate and its modern offspring
Mathematical Games, August 1981
The abstract parabola fits the concrete world
Mathematical Games, June 1981
The inspired geometrical symmetries of Scott Kim
Mathematical Games, April 1981
How Lavinia finds a room on University A venue, and other geometric problems
Mathematical Games, February 1981
Gauss's congruence theory was mod as early as 1801
The Sciences
Mathematical Games, December 1980
Patterns in primes are a clue to the strong law of small numbers
Mathematical Games, November 1980
Taxicab geometry offers a free ride to a non-Euclidean locale
Mathematical Games, October 1980
From counting votes to making votes count: the mathematics of elections
The Sciences
Mathematical Games, September 1980
Dr. Matrix, like Mr. Holmes, comes to an untimely and mysterious end
Mathematical Games, August 1980
On the fine art of putting players, pills and points into their proper pigeonholes
Mathematical Games, July 1980
The pleasures of doing Science and technology in the planiverse
Mathematical Games, June 1980
The capture of the monster: a mathematical group with a ridiculous number of elements
Mathematical Games, May 1980
What unifies dinner guests, strolling schoolgirls and handcuffed prisoners?
