Happy 95th Birthday to Martin Gardner

I would like to dedicate my blog post to someone who has had an enormous influence on my choice of career. On Wednesday Martin Gardner, the former Scientific American columnist and prolific author, turns 95. I was probably in the 6th grade when I was first exposed to Gardner's writing. At the time I had no idea what philosophy was or that there were grown-up people who actually made a living as philosophers. But I was fascinated by math even when I found it difficult, and I was especially impressed by Gardner's popular writings on math and logic. I remember picking up a book with the odd title The Unexpected Hanging at a bookstore in New York. Opening it, I discovered a collection of essays drawn from Gardner's column on recreational mathematics. The first chapter was devoted to a famous paradox involving a man condemned to hang but without knowing on which day of the week his execution would take place. Gardner wrote clearly and intelligently about what was to me a highly complex and convoluted topic. I was hooked and the path that would lead me eventually to logic began.

After that first encounter, I became a passionate fan, reading as many of Gardner's books as I could get my hands on. I had found an author who shared my interests: not only logic but science and pseudo-science, Alice in Wonderland, cryptography, computers that can learn to play games, magic, and the fourth dimension. It wasn't until much later that I learned that Gardner majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago, a student of Rudolph Carnap, one of the founders of analytic philosophy.

I was happy to see a birthday tribute to Gardner in today's New York Times. I wish him a very happy 95th and many, many more.