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On the Autobiography of Martin Gardner

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On the Autobiography of Martin Gardner Who Wrote Martin Gardner’s Autobiography? Why did it take so long to publish it? Once Princeton University Press began to promote Undiluted Hocus Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner, some people began to ask, “Who wrote the book?” We initially thought they were confusing a biography with an autobiography but now that we have read a few reviews on amazon, we understand why they have asked the question. Some believe that Gardner’s friends put together bits and pieces of things that Martin Gardner wrote and that his son and editor possibly added pieces as well. So to clarify things, here is the back story about the publication of this book. I (Vickie) never met Martin Gardner. I never talked with him on the phone. But, we did write letters to one another for almost 25 years. No one writes letters anymore so when I receive one, I always get excited—especially when it is from Martin Gardner. His letters were always full of fun information and sometimes they concerned book projects we were working on. The letters were always written on a typewriter and corrected by hand in ink, often green. He wrote in small script and it sometimes took a while to sort out the handwriting but the letters were always a treasure trove and worth the effort to decipher. When Martin’s son, Jim Gardner, contacted me and asked if Princeton University Press would be interested in publishing Martin’s autobiography, I was thrilled. I could not think of a book I would more like to publish. As with many people, Martin Gardner had a huge amount to do with my becoming a math major so being able to do something for him was a fantastic opportunity. When Jim sent the manuscript I started laughing because it looked like an extremely long letter. It was written with the same typewriter and edited in the same way as his letters. When you look at the pages we have included, you will see what I mean. Jim and Vickie talked for a long time about Martin’s wishes for the manuscript and we decided that we would change as little as possible in the manuscript. We could not ask the author his opinion about any changes so we kept asking ourselves would Martin like any changes we planned before we made them. We worked to correct typos and filled in as many of his ??? notes as possible. He had sprinkled these throughout the manuscript. We tried our best to confirm dates and the order in which events took place. There are a few places in the manuscript where there is some repetition. Martin had many interests and we knew some people would go only to the chapters that interested them. So, we allowed the repeated material to stand. Some people ask why it took so long to publish the book after Martin’s death. He finished the manuscript a few months before he died and passed it to Jim to decide what to do with it. With any large estate, there are lots of decisions to make and time passes quickly. It simply got to a point in time where the estate realized Martin’s desire to have it published needed to be implemented. People who knew Martin well have found some wonderful stories in the book that they never heard before. Other people wish there was more in the book about other things and wonder why he included what he did. We will never know the answer to that question but we do know the answer to “Who wrote Martin Gardner’s autobiography? “Martin Gardner did! Jim Gardner and Vickie Kearn Gathering for Gardner XI, March 2014 Contents Preface 1. Earliest Memories 2. Lee School 3. Tulsa Central High, I 4. Central High, II 5 $. Hutchins and Adler 6. Richard McKeon 7/ I Lose My Faith 8. Chicago, I 9. Chicago, II 10. I Become a Journalist 11. Mother and Dad1 12. The Navy, I 13. The Navy, II 14. Esquire and Humpty Bill A 15. Scientific American 16. Pseudoscience 17. Mathematician Friends 18. Charlotte 19. Bob and Betty 20. ~hH:o-so-phy (,V d . Index .,). ; ,: }/\ ~ p~ I \ C~ ;...:'.\"\ Preface The American philosopher William James once said he couldn't understand how any,bne could read the Bible from cover to cove'Jr and believe it was the word of God. The Old Tes~~ent' s Jehovah is an angry, cruel tyrant. He drowns every man, f\ V woman, and child, and their pets, except for !(oah and his family. He turns Lot's wife into a pillar of sa~t because she disobeys him by looking~k at Sodom land - ~ ~~L Gomorrah wh~le his ange"s ~ demolishing both towns. When Moses' two nephews • 'S.o d Is/ll(;d. m~ed incense improperly for an anima~acrifice, God eo diskiie the smoky smell that he killed both boys with lightning bolts.# .,..~. t\. t (lV.c;t Jesus' God was mo¥te merciful. He only ~ eternally such evil men as the extretfgly weafthy. Paul's god was ImiIeR worse. He punished forever (forever!) thfse who held incorrect beliefs about Jesus and his Resurrection! The best known remark of stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce was that people a. are leaving their churches and going back to God. What follows here is"rambling A\J~iograPhy of one such pe~n:t ~y me. Martin Gardner Norman, Oklahoma 13 ( .. 14. Scientific American ~~~"V\., The second luckiest ~ in my life -- the ,first was meeting Charlotte --­ was my association with Scientific American. Here)lS how it came '------::;--9·:-:. about. I was visiting one aftemoon a New York City stockbroker named Royal V. Heath.X We were friends through £t mutual interest in i'A magic.)\. Heath had';­ writt~n a little book on number tricks, and I had published a series of articles on mathematical maijic~ in Scripta Mathematica. This was a joumal edited by Jekuthiel Ginsberg, of Yeshiva University, who also sponsored gatherings at the university to hear mathematicians give talks on recr~ional topics. My articles 1\ were later made into a book, ~thematf\iJ§, ~c, land Myste~, still in ~"'T" as a Dover paperback. Heath showed me a mathematical toy I had never seen before. It was a large cloth structureJ(called a hexahexaflexagon. You "flexed" it a certin way that unfolded it, then folded it back again to display a face of a different color. Heath told me it had been invented and studied by a group of graduate stuints ,. " at Princeton University. One ~ in its name ~ for the number of sides) ~ ~ CQ~ ~~ _ the other for the mlIil'9r of different faces that Q01l1d exposed by flexingX-;-k.. ~ ~" ~ Sf~#",-n I Heath gave me the name of one of the A John Tukey, who later became a renowned ~ tepelegjak:s. Md.Hv:JIQ.i,ctlt.~ ( I had previously sold to Scientific American an article - ,.. on logic machines. It occ~ed ~: me ithat ,tthe ~~;6if:~ spring for an .%.. d.""o 'i ~ - a1.I\icle on flexagons. I taU a bOS to Princeton where I met Tukey, and Bryant Tuckerman, responsible for the "Tuckerman Tra;(verse,"""'" a way of exploring all the faces of a flexagon. Arthur Stone, the actual discoverer of flexagons was not there becaus,e he lived in England, nor was Richarcif Feyrunan , ~re,ady a famous tCj6 UJ'iJ.L physicist at Cal Tech. ~ had been a ma~jor contributor to flexagon theory when he haa\..oJ been'" 5 at Princeton. o~ f\"'''I'c-~u~~ (?o.~ r"" ir Scientific Americau snapped up my article whieR !!AB in the December 1956 issue. Allover New York City reaFders of the"" magazine, especially those in advertising offices, were making and flexing flexagons. Today there are sane gVlrlUMr4 fifty web sites devoted to flexagon theory and s~53A§e variants of the ~ ../\ original forms. Gerard Piel, publisher of ~entific American, called me to his office to , •• ~.·A~""'\ ask if there was enough similar material $""""* to make a ~ colunm. I said r.. h V"1'''r, i.e ·1 wqs sure there was. I weRt at once to the used bookstore section of Manhattan, i\ then near the Village, to buy all the books I could find on recritional math, /) notably W. W. Rouse Ball's classic Mathematical Rec:-ations and Essays, and several lesser works by other~~ I subnitted my first colunm, on aS~~l~:type of magicriquar~~~ forceA. somefoDe to choose ~r des~1!d number even though the ""­ choice seem~ !sf; loaM,- random. Scientific AmeriC{lI1 called the colunm Mathematical Games, which by coincidence had the same initial letters as my 7' full name,. aftd the rest is history. , "1" ~s Writing the column for more than 25 years was one of the greatest PlGd&dLs CI)Mh""".{2J' of my life. If you look over all my. columns (they are collected iD fifteen 0{ €=iP ,\ .. ' ~ '\'" ... " books) you'll find that they stea~y become more sophisticated mathemati- ,P" ...HS cally. That was because I was learning math. I had not taken a single math course in co~ge, ¢tlthough I loved the low-level math I learned i~h school. a.. ~L 1-.1.. w ~S And I had al~s been fond of of~ecreational matlpver since I l~ teen intro- duced to it as a boy by Sam Loyd's marrmoth CyclopediJV (' P p"?o."'l.t S , "'1.tA")""~~ Id 'ft1 One of the ~ in writing the colunm was that it introducea melmany top mathematiciarf, which of course I was not.
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