Martin Gardner's Mathematics Articles

   
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In addition to his early Scripta Mathematica pieces and his extensive catalogue of mathematical articles (mathemarticles?) in Scientific American, Martin published mathematics articles in more traditional outlets in the last two decades of his career, some with very notable collaborators. These varied in style from his usual informal, chatty expositions to pieces with complete proofs of complex results.

Martin's own A Gardner's Workout (A.K. Peters, 2001, 11 + 319 pages), subtitled "Training the Mind and Entertaining the Spirit," collects 34 of his articles on mathematics, computers, chess, and word games, in addition to 7 book reviews. Many of the articles listed below are included, sometimes under different titles.

Martin Gardner in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Michael Henle and Brian Hopkins (MAA, 2012, 13 + 295 pages) "collects the articles Gardner wrote for the MAA in the twenty-first century, together with other articles the MAA published from 1999 to 2012 that spring from and comment on his work." In fact, "Eight of Gardner's articles are presented here: together they represent his playful and engaging approach to recreational mathematics, and the breadth of his interests, spanning geometry, number theory, graph theory, probability, and pseudo-science."


From 1988 on, Martin published over 20 mathematics articles, picking up a few writing awards along the way. Several of these appeared as part of an irregular column he wrote for Math Horizons called "Gardner's Gatherings."

In 1989, in his 75th year, Martin broke into formal academic journal publishing, as co-author of an article in Mathematics Magazine.

Here's an incomplete list of the mathematical papers he published in his later years:

"The Propositional Calculus with Directed Graphs" (with Frank Harary, Eureka, Mar 1988, No 48, 33–40).

"Steiner Trees on a Checkerboard" (with Fan Chung and Ronald Graham, Mathematics Magazine, Apr 1989, Vol 62, 83–96, winner of the 1990 Carl D. Allendoerfer Award for expository writing).

"Tiling the Bent Tromino with n congruent shapes" (Journal of Recreational Mathematics, 1990, Vol 22, No 3, 185–191).

"Serial Isogons of 90 Degrees" (with Lee Sallows, Richard K. Guy and Don Knuth, Mathematics Magazine, Dec 1991, Vol 84, No 5, 315–324).

"A Royal Problem" (with Andy Liu, Quantum, Jul/Aug 1993, Vol 3, No 6, 30–).

"Six Challenging Dissection Tasks" (Quantum, May/Jun 1994, Vol 4, No 5, 26–27).

"Word Ladders: Lewis Carroll's Doublets" (Math Horizons, Nov 1994, Vol 2, No2, 18–19).

"Lewis Carroll's Sleepless Nights" (Quantum, Mar/Apr 1995, Vol 5, No 4, 40–).

"Dr. Matrix on the Wonders of 8" (Quantum, Jul/Aug 1995, Vol 5, No 6, 43–).

"The Magic 3 x 3" (Quantum, Jan/Feb 1996, Vol 6, No 3, 24–).

"The Ant on 1 x 1 x 2" (Math Horizons, Feb 1996, Vol 3, No 3, 8–9).

"Talkative Eve" (Math Horizons, Apr 1996, Vol 3, No 4, 18–19, and MAA Focus, Sep 2010)

"Lucky Numbers and 2187" (The Mathematics Intelligencer, Spring 1997, Vol 19, No 2, 26–29).

"The Square Root of two = 1.41421 35623 73095..." (Math Horizons, Apr 1997, 5–8, winner of the 1998 Trevor Evans Award).

"Some Surprising Theorems About Rectangles in Triangles" (Math Horizons, Sep 1997, Vol 5, No 1, 18–22).

"Some New Discoveries About 3 x 3 Magic Squares" (Math Horizons, Feb 1998, Vol 5, No 3, 11–13).

"Ten Amazing Mathematical Tricks" (Math Horizons, Sep 1998, Vol 6, No 1, 13–15, 26).

"The Asymmetric Propeller" (The College Mathematics Journal, Jan 1999, Vol 30, No 1, 18–22, winner of the 2000 George Pólya Award).

"Chess Queens and Maximum Unattacked Cells" (Math Horizons, Nov 1999, Vol 7, No 1, 12–16).

"Modeling Mathematics with Playing Cards" (The College Mathematics Journal, May 2000, Vol 31, No 3, 173–177).

"Superstrings and Thelma" (Math Horizons, Sep 2010) is a piece of short fiction.


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