马丁·加德纳

马丁·加德纳（英语：Martin Gardner，1914年10月21日—2010年5月22日）。美国名声显赫的业余数学大师、魔术师、怀疑论者，他是《科学美国人》杂志上一个曾开设了20多年的数学游戏专栏作者。他没有数学博士学位，但是他的作品能让广大普通读者和数学家也为之着迷。马丁·加德纳才华横溢，著作颇丰，据不完全统计，迄今已写了五十本以上的书。他曾多次获奖，包括美国物理学会及美国钢铁基金会的优秀科学作者奖，台湾的出版社也以“加德纳”、“葛老爹”为名翻译他的著作。

生平

他生于美国俄克拉荷马州的塔尔萨（Tulsa）。1936年，毕业于芝加哥大学哲学系。在进入大学之前，他是一个新教原教旨主义者。通过理性的思考，在大学期间他的信仰发生了变化，后来他成了一位哲学有神论者。毕业后他在家乡的《民友报》担任记者。二战期间，他成为美国海军的随军记者。战后，他继续从事自由撰稿人和编辑工作。他的主要工作是1957年到1981年在《科学美国人》的长期专栏作家，他所包办的“数学游戏”专栏，成为该杂志的一个“特色产品”。

被翻译为中文的作品

《跳出思路的陷阱》

《密码传奇》

《人人都能懂得的相对论》

《表里不一的宇宙》

《好科学、坏科学、伪科学》

《不可思议的矩阵博士》

《数学狂欢节》

《啊哈？灵机一动》

《从惊讶到思考——数学悖论奇景》

《矛盾集锦》 原名：Paradox Box

《数学推敲》

《打开魔数箱》

Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914 – May 22, 2010) was an American writer on popular mathematics and popular science. His interests also encompassed magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature – especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was a leading authority on Lewis Carroll; The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century". He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.

Gardner was best known for creating and sustaining interest in recreational mathematics—and by extension, mathematics in general—throughout the latter half of the 20th century, principally through his "Mathematical Games" columns. These appeared for twenty-five years in Scientific American, and his subsequent books collecting them.

Gardner was one of the foremost anti-pseudoscience polemicists of the 20th century. His 1957 book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science is a seminal work of the skeptical movement. In 1976, he joined with fellow skeptics to found CSICOP, an organization promoting scientific inquiry and the use of reason in examining extraordinary claims.

Biography

Youth and education

Martin Gardner was born into a prosperous family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to James Henry Gardner, a petroleum geologist, and his wife, Willie Wilkerson Spiers, a Montessori-trained teacher. His mother taught Martin to read before he started school, reading him The Wizard of Oz, which began a lifelong interest in the Oz books of L. Frank Baum. His fascination with mathematics started in his boyhood when his father gave him a copy of Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks and Conundrums.

He attended the University of Chicago where he studied history, literature and sciences under their intellectually-stimulating Great Books curriculum and earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1936. Early jobs included reporter on the Tulsa Tribune, writer at the University of Chicago Office of Press Relations, and case worker in Chicago's Black Belt for the city's Relief Administration. During World War II, he served for four years in the U.S. Navy as a yeoman on board the destroyer escort USS Pope in the Atlantic. His ship was still in the Atlantic when the war came to an end with the surrender of Japan in August 1945.

After the war, Gardner returned to the University of Chicago. He attended graduate school for a year there, but he did not earn an advanced degree.

Early career

In the late 1940s, Gardner moved to New York City and became a writer and editor at Humpty Dumpty magazine, where for eight years, he wrote features and stories for it and several other children's magazines. His paper-folding puzzles at that magazine led to his first work at Scientific American. For many decades, Gardner, his wife Charlotte, and their two sons, Jim and Tom, lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where he earned his living as a freelance author, publishing books with several different publishers, and also publishing hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles.

Middle age

In 1950, he wrote an article in the Antioch Review entitled "The Hermit Scientist". It was one of Gardner's earliest articles about junk science, and in 1952 a much-expanded version became his first published book: In the Name of Science: An Entertaining Survey of the High Priests and Cultists of Science, Past and Present. The year 1960 saw the original edition of the best-selling book of his career, The Annotated Alice.