Martin Gardner: A Video Remembrance

This past week­end, Mar­tin Gard­ner, a gift­ed and pro­lif­ic pop­u­lar­iz­er of math­e­mat­ics and sci­ence, passed away at 95. Dur­ing his life, Gard­ner pub­lished more than 70 books and wrote the pop­u­lar “Math­e­mat­i­cal Games” col­umn for Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can mag­a­zine for 25 years. As The New York Times obit notes, his math­e­mat­i­cal writ­ings “intrigued a gen­er­a­tion of math­e­mati­cians,” and he earned the admi­ra­tion of many lead­ing intel­lec­tu­als, includ­ing W. H. Auden, Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Jay Gould, Vladimir Nabokov, and Carl Sagan. Not bad for a man who nev­er took a col­lege-lev­el math course. Above, you will find a 46-minute video pro­file of Gard­ner from David Suzuk­i’s CBC tele­vi­sion series “The Nature of Things.” It’s a great intro­duc­tion to Gard­ner and his unique approach to math and sci­ence.

Thanks goes to Mike for send­ing the video our way.