Martin Gardner, AB’36, prolific author and prominent skeptic, 1914–2010

Martin Gardner, AB'36, a writer on wide-ranging subjects who achieved some of his greatest renown as author of the "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American, died May 22 in Norman, Okla., at age 95.

Gardner received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago and went on to publish more than 70 books, on topics ranging from the foibles of pseudoscience to the fiction of Lewis Carroll. His long-running commitment to skeptical thinking and making technical subjects accessible to the public earned him widespread praise among professional scholars.

"Many have tried to emulate him," the mathematician Ronald Graham said of Gardner in 2009, according to the Washington Post's obituary. "No one has succeeded."

Gardner was born on Oct. 21, 1914, in Tulsa, Okla., where he returned after college to work on the Tulsa Tribune. He came back to the University of Chicago to work in the News Office; he also wrote interviews and the News of the Quadrangles section for the University of Chicago Magazine. His association with the magazine continued in later years, including a 1975 piece on "The Magic Hexagon." He also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm (1944), about a Divinity School student at UChicago.

Gardner wrote his Scientific American column from 1956 to 1981, sparking curiosity and enthusiasm from experts and non-experts alike. He often said that his skill in mathematics was slight, but with effort he made that an asset in writing his columns.

"The big secret of my success as a columnist was that I didn't know much about math," Gardner told New York Times writer John Tierney in 2009. "I had to struggle to get everything clear before I wrote a column, so that meant I could write it in a way that people could understand."

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