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Science Luminary Martin Gardner Dead at 95

Posted by timothy on from the sad-to-note dept.

From James Randi's blog comes word that science writer Martin Gardner has died at the age of 95. I never met Gardner, but one of his books (Entertaining Science Experiments With Everyday Objects) has been a favorite of mine since I was 6 or 7 years old; I didn't realize until just now quite how many books he authored.

6 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Adieu, Martin by ridgecritter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    His pages in Scientific American were something I always looked forward to, and from which I always learned something. Glad he was among us.

    1. Re:Adieu, Martin by dbg1000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This great quote sums it up for me and my son:

      "Martin Gardner has turned dozens of innocent youngsters into math professors, and thousands of math professors into innocent youngsters."

      From "Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems," attributed to Persi Diaconis

  2. R.I.P., Martin Gardner by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I want to speak for the entire geek community, so I'm posting A.C.

    Martin, you will be dearly missed. You've probably changed more lives than you could ever realize, and this planet was a better place because you existed.

    Requiescat in pace.

  3. The world is out of balance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's guys like Martin that provided some balance against mindless idiots like those on the Texas education boards.

    Let's hope there's a thousand more Martins out there. Surely he would hope the same.

    RIP.

  4. Martin Gardner mattered by Shimmer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In the 1970s and early 80s, before the internet, before personal computers, nothing linked geeks together more than Martin Gardner's monthly column in Scientific American. I amazed myself with his binary card deck, and collected matchboxes to make a tic-tac-toe learning computer.

    His work will live on. I'm sitting next to a shelf full of his books as I type this.

    --
    The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
  5. Re:Good riddance. by belochitski · · Score: 4, Insightful

    >He was of the idea that there is no way to prove the non-existence of god

    This is, in fact, correct. In natural sciences it is only possible to show that something does exist. It is not possible to prove non-existatnce. (It is not the case in mathematics, but mathematics is not a natural science).

    The easiest way to understand it is to realize that the body observations available to science was taken in a limited period of time and area of space. Thus the our current scientific view of the world is only formally valid in this limited domain. What exist outside of it is only our educated guess.