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Photograph of Martin Gardner at a CSICOP meeting, 1979
RobertoTenore · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Licence · Wikimedia Commons

Games & puzzles

Martin Gardner

1914–2010

The writer who made recreational mathematics popular, through his "Mathematical Games" column.

Born
21 October 1914 · Tulsa, Oklahoma
Died
22 May 2010 · Norman, Oklahoma
Nationality
American
  • recreational mathematics
  • puzzles
  • Lewis Carroll
  • magic
  • scepticism

A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Martin Gardner, their publishers or their estate. Martin Gardner appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.

Biography

The life, briefly

Martin Gardner was born in Tulsa and studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1936. He never took a mathematics course after high school; he came to the subject as a writer, editor and amateur magician, and that is part of why he explained it so well.

In 1956 a free-standing article on hexaflexagons in Scientific American led to a regular column, "Mathematical Games", which ran for twenty-five years and brought puzzles, paradoxes and new mathematics to a general audience. He published more than a hundred books, and was also a leading sceptic of pseudoscience and a leading authority on Lewis Carroll.

Works

Major works

  1. 1952In the Name of Sciencehis first published book; revised in 1957 as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
  2. 1957Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Sciencea founding book of the sceptical movement
  3. 1960The Annotated Alicethe Alice books with Gardner's notes on their riddles, wordplay and mathematics; his most successful book
  4. 2013Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardnerwritten at 95

Timeline

Turning points

  1. 1936

    Took his bachelor's degree in philosophy at the University of Chicago.

  2. 1952

    Published his first book, In the Name of Science, an enlargement of a 1950 Antioch Review article.

  3. 1956

    A hexaflexagon article in the December issue of Scientific American began the "Mathematical Games" column.

  4. 1957

    Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science was published.

  5. 1976

    Joined fellow sceptics to found CSICOP, an organisation for testing extraordinary claims.

  6. 1986

    The June issue carried the last instalment of the column under its original title.

  7. 2010

    Died at 95.

Why they are here

Martin Gardner and the shelf

Relevance

Gardner is the doyen of American puzzlers. His column made recreational mathematics a mainstream interest for the second half of the twentieth century, and his annotated Alice is the standard way into Lewis Carroll's logic and wordplay.

Influence

His admirers included W. H. Auden, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov and Richard Dawkins, and a whole community of puzzle-makers meets every two years in his memory.

Nearby on the shelf

If you read this, you might look here

These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by Martin Gardner, and they are not a recommendation on Martin Gardner’s behalf — only the same shelf.

Related authors

Read alongside

Sources

Where this comes from

Everything on this page about Martin Gardner is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.