The Strand Magazine
The Strand Magazine was a monthly magazine founded by George Newnes, composed of short fiction and general interest articles. It was published in the United Kingdom from January 1891 to March 1950, running to 711 issues, though the first issue was on sale well before Christmas 1890, its immediate popularity is evidenced by an initial sale of nearly 300,000. Sales increased in the early months, before settling down to a circulation of 500,000 copies a month which lasted well into the 1930s, it was edited by Herbert Greenhough Smith from 1891 to 1930. The magazine's original offices were in Burleigh Street off The London, it was revived in 1998 as a quarterly magazine. It was bound as six-monthly volumes, from January to June and July to December, but from the mid-1930s this varied, the final volumes in the late 1940s ran from October to March and April to September, the final volume CXVIII running from October 1949 to March 1950; the Sherlock Holmes short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle were first published in The Strand with illustrations by Sidney Paget.
With the serialisation of Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, sales reached their peak. Readers lined up outside the magazine's offices. E. W. Hornung's stories about A. J. Raffles, the "gentleman thief", first appeared in The Strand in the 1890s. Other contributors included Grant Allen, Margery Allingham, J. E. Preston Muddock, H. G. Wells, E. C. Bentley, Agatha Christie, Mary Angela Dickens, C. B. Fry, Walter Goodman, E. Nesbit, W. W. Jacobs, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Morrison, Dorothy L. Sayers, Georges Simenon, Edgar Wallace, Max Beerbohm, P. G. Wodehouse, Dornford Yates and Winston Churchill. Once a sketch drawn by Queen Victoria of one of her children appeared with her permission. In addition to the many fiction pieces and illustrations, The Strand has been known for some time as the source of ground-breaking brain teasers, under a column called "Perplexities", first written by Henry Dudeney. Dudeney introduced many new concepts to the puzzle world, including the first known crossnumber puzzle, in 1926.
In that same year, Dudeney produced an article, "The Psychology of Puzzle Crazes", reflecting and analysing the demand for such works. He edited Perplexities from 1910 until he died in 1930. G. H. Savage became the column's editor, soon to be joined by William Thomas Williams, who in 1935 authored the best-known cross-figure puzzle of today; the puzzle goes by many names, the original being "The Little Pigley Farm". It has been known as "Dog's Mead", "Little Pigley", "Little Piggly Farm", "Little Pigsby", "Pilgrims’ Plot", "Dog Days"; the magazine's iconic cover, an illustration looking eastwards down London's Strand towards St Mary-le-Strand, with the title suspended on telegraph wires, was the work of Victorian artist and designer George Charles Haité. The initial cover featured a corner plaque showing the name of Burleigh Street, home to the magazine's original offices; the lettering on the plaque in Haité's design was changed when Newnes moved to the adjacent address of Southampton Street.
A variation of the same design was featured on the cover of a sister title, The Strand Musical Magazine. The magazine format changed to the smaller digest size in October 1941; the Strand Magazine ceased publication in March 1950, forced out of the market by declining circulation and rising costs. Its last editor was Macdonald Hastings, distinguished war correspondent and TV reporter and contributor to the Eagle boys' comic; the magazine published a United States edition from February 1891 through February 1916. In its early years, the contents of the U. S. edition were identical with those of the U. K. edition, though with a one-month time lag. As the years went on there were some differences in the contents of the two editions, reflecting fiction for which The Strand did not hold the U. S. rights and non-fiction that would not interest most U. S. readers. The circulation of the U. S. edition was minimal in the early 1890s but was reported at 150,000 by 1898. The U. S. edition was discontinued in 1916 due to logistical difficulties arising from World War I.
The Strand was brought back into publication in 1998 as a quarterly magazine, now based in Birmingham, Michigan. It has published fiction by many well-known writers including John Mortimer, Ray Bradbury, Alexander McCall Smith, Ruth Rendell, Colin Dexter, Edward Hoch, James Grippando, Tennessee Williams. Pound, Reginald, A Maypole in the Strand. Pound, The Strand Magazine: 1891–1950. Beare, Index to The Strand Magazine, 1891–1950. Ashley, The Age of the Storytellers. Pittard, Christopher, "Cheap, Healthful Literature": The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, Purified Reading Communities, Victorian Periodicals Review 40:1, pp. 1–23. 1998 description of historic Strand Magazine by Chris Willis Chronology of Recreational Mathematics, by David Singmaster The Little Pigley Farm crossnumber puzzle and its history by Joel Pomerantz Public domain scans of the first 384 issues of The Strand Magazine from January 1891–1922 December, at Internet Archive.org. VictorianVoices.net Excerpts from The Strand Magazine.
"The Strand magazine 1891–1930". Studiumfashl magazine. An index of the fiction Indexing The Strand magazine - article by Geradine Beare, 1984; the Strand Magazine archives, upenn.edu The Strand Magazine Official Website of new Strand magazine
Snake oil
Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicament utilizing fat extracted from the Chinese water snake. It is a rubefacient and/or ointment, is applied topically to relieve minor physical pain, it has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for many centuries, is a common medication prescribed by doctors ascribing the practice of traditional Chinese medicine. Its effectiveness as medicine has been a historical source of controversy in the Western world, where there is much confusion over its origin and constitution due to a U. S. District Court judgment against Clark Stanley. In Western culture, snake oil is most associated with a placebo, panacea and/or deceptive marketing, its association in Western culture lies in the fact that many 19th-century United States and 18th-century European entrepreneurs advertised and sold mineral oil as "snake oil liniment", making frivolous claims about its efficacy as a panacea. Patent medicines that claimed to be a cure-all panacea were common from the 18th until the 20th century among vendors masking addictive drugs such as cocaine, amphetamine and opium-based concoctions and/or elixirs, to be sold as medication and/or products promoting health at medicine shows.
The marketing concept for snake oil was transferred to the US from trade and exposure to 18th-century British culture. However, the actual source of its use as a folk remedy was introduced to its introduction in the UK, by Chinese laborers involved in building the First Transcontinental Railroad in the US, were undoubtedly familiar with Traditional Chinese Medicine, using snake oil to treat joint pain such as arthritis and bursitis, while introducing it to fellow American workers; when rubbed on the skin at the painful site, snake oil was claimed to bring relief. This claim was ridiculed by 19th-century rival medicine salespeople, who competed with snake oil entrepreneurs in peddling other medicines for pain offering more hazardous alternatives such as alcohol and/or opium. Patent medicines originated in England, where a patent was granted to Richard Stoughton's elixir in 1712. There were no federal regulations in the United States concerning safety and effectiveness of drugs until the 1906 Food and Drugs Act.
Thus, the widespread marketing and availability of dubiously advertised patent medicines without known properties or origin persisted in the US for a much greater number of years than in Europe. In 18th-century Europe in the UK, viper oil had been recommended for many afflictions, including the ones for which oil from the rattlesnake a type of viper native to America, was subsequently favored to treat rheumatism and skin diseases. Though there are accounts of oil obtained from the fat of various vipers in the Western world, the claims of its effectiveness as a medicine have never been examined, its efficacy is unknown, it is likely that much of the snake oil sold by Western entrepreneurs was illegitimate, did not contain ingredients derived from any kind of snake. Snake oil in the United Kingdom and United States contained modified mineral oil. In popular culture within the United States, snake oil is renowned to be a commodity peddled at American Old West-themed medicine shows, although the judgment condemning snake oil as medicine took place in Rhode Island, involved snake oil manufactured in Massachusetts.
The snake oil peddler is a stock character in Western movies, depicted as a traveling "doctor" with dubious credentials, selling fake medicines with boisterous marketing hype supported by pseudo-scientific evidence. To increase sales, an accomplice in the crowd will attest to the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm; the "doctor" will leave town. This practice has wide-ranging implications, is known as a confidence trick, a type of fraud; this particular confidence trick is purported to have been a common mechanism utilized by peddlers in order to sell various counterfeit and generic medications at medicine shows. The drastic amount of fraud extending to the drug epidemic was unfolded, exposed with a judgment against Clark Stanley, which condemned the patented Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment in US District Court; this minor ruling, much like the process that unfolded in the UK during the previous century, set a precedent for government bureaucracies to exert greater authority over traditional practices in health and medicine.
Snake oil has grown to epitomize patent medicine, represents a healthy act of scapegoating that allowed for government controlled bureaucracy to seize authority over the means to control a drug epidemic involving alcohol and opium during the 19th century in the US. This increased authority led to the evolution and expansion of bureaucracies such as the Food and Drug Administration in the US; the composition of snake oil medicines varies markedly among products. Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment – produced by Clark Stanley, the "Rattlesnake King" – was tested by the United States government's Bureau of Chemistry, the precursor to the Food and Drug Administration in 1916, it was found to contain: mineral oil 1% fatty oil capsaicin from chili peppers turpentine camphorAlthough most snake oil in the Western world was drastically overpriced and falsely advertised it is arguable whether or not it is representative of a placebo given that Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment, the only Western produced snake oil known to have been examined, is similar in composition to m
World Chess Hall of Fame
The World Chess Hall of Fame is a nonprofit, collecting institution situated in the Central West End neighborhood of St. Louis, United States; the WCHOF is the only institution of its kind and offers a variety of programming to explore the dynamic relationship between art and chess, including educational outreach initiatives that provide context and meaning to the game and its continued educational impact. Founded in 1984, it is run by the United States Chess Trust. Located in New Windsor, New York. C.. The brainchild of Steven Doyle, USCF president from 1984 to 1987, the World Chess Hall of Fame was created in 1986 as the U. S. Chess Hall of Fame. Opened in 1988 in the basement of the Federation's then-headquarters in New Windsor, New York, the small museum contained a modest collection, including a book of chess openings signed by Bobby Fischer. In 1992, the U. S. Chess Trust purchased the museum and moved its contents to Washington D. C. At its Washington D. C. location from 1992 to 2001, the hall featured America's "big four" chess players: Paul Morphy, Bobby Fischer, Frank Marshall, Samuel Reshevsky.
It displayed the World Chess Championship trophy won by the United States team in 1993 as well as numerous chess boards and chess pieces. The museum gave visitors the opportunity to play against a chess computer. By 2001, the collection had grown to include numerous chess sets and boards and plaques commemorating inductees to the U. S. and World halls of fame. In the late 1990s, Sidney Samole, former owner of Excalibur Electronics, proposed to move the hall of fame to Miami, where it would be located in a rook-shaped building constructed by Excalibur. Although Samole died in 2000, the U. S. Chess Trust accepted the proposal the following year. Reopened in 2001, it was renamed the World Chess Hall of Sidney Samole Museum; the museum continued collecting chess sets, tournament memorabilia, photographs, medals and journals until it closed in 2009. Philanthropist Rex Sinquefield soon afterward agreed to pay for moving the museum to St. Louis and renovating its new building; the World Chess Hall of Fame is located across the street from the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis in the city's Central West End neighborhood.
It displays artifacts from the museum's permanent collection and temporary exhibitions highlighting the great players, historic games, rich cultural history of chess as well as the U. S. and World Chess Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame collaborates with the Chess Club and Scholastic Center to provide programming and outreach to an international audience of novices and experts alike, its collection includes pieces such as a 500-year-old piece from an Egyptian game called senet, the earliest known board game. Rotating exhibitions feature items from the permanent collection; the Hall of Fame commemorates the careers of its members. There are 52 members in the U. S. Hall of Fame, including Bobby Fischer, John W. Collins, Larry Evans, Benjamin Franklin, George Koltanowski, Sammy Reshevsky, Paul Morphy, Arnold Denker. There are 19 members in the World Hall of Fame, including José Raúl Capablanca, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Boris Spassky; the winner of the first Women's World Chess Championship, Vera Menchik, was the first woman to be inducted into the WCHOF in 2011.
The 2011 inductions took place on September 8 as part of the World Chess Hall of Fame Grand Opening celebration. The U. S. Chess Federation Hall of Fame Committee considers candidates for the U. S. Chess Hall of Fame and sends its nominations to the U. S. Chess Trust each year; the trustees of the U. S. Chess Trust vote on; the induction itself take place either at the U. S. Chess Federation Awards Luncheon during the U. S. Open or at the World Chess Hall of Fame, now located in Saint Louis, Missouri; the induction is always performed by either the Chairman of the U. S. Chess Trust or the Chairman of the Hall of Fame Committee. Current members of the committee are Harold Winston, John Donaldson, John McCrary, Al Lawrence, GM Joel Benjamin, GM Arthur Bisguier, John Hilbert, Jennifer Shahade, Shane Samole. McCrary and Donaldson are former Chairs of the Hall of Fame Committee. Both Bisguier and Benjamin are members of the Hall of Fame. Samole was in charge of the Hall of Fame when it was located in Miami, Florida from 2001-2009.
The World Chess Hall of Fame inductees are nominated by representatives of the World Chess Federation. Upon its move to St. Louis in 2011, the World Chess Hall of Fame not only features chess artifacts from throughout history in its permanent collection, but art and artifacts on loan from various artists and collectors. On view from September 9, 2011 to February 12, 2012, this contemporary art exhibition was curated by Bradley Bailey, assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at Saint Louis University, It featured artworks that consider chess both at the formal level and at the level of actual play; the artists featured in this exhibition were Tom Friedman, Barbara Kruger, Liliya Lifanova, Yoko Ono, Gavin Turk, Diana Thater, Guido van der Werve. On the exhibit's opening night, Dutch contemporary artist, Guido van der Werve, performed on a one-of-a-kind chess piano that he built; the piano sounded a note as each chess piece was played, while nine string musicians from the Saint Louis Symphony played van der Werve's score
Harry Golombek
Harry Golombek OBE, was a British chess grandmaster, chess arbiter, chess author, wartime codebreaker. He was three times British chess champion, in 1947, 1949, 1955 and finished second in 1948, he was retrospectively awarded the grandmaster title in 1985. He was born in Lambeth to Polish-Jewish parents, he was the chess correspondent of The Times newspaper from 1945 to 1989, following Stuart Milner-Barry. He was an official of the FIDE, served as Arbiter for several important events, including the Candidates' Tournament of 1959 in Yugoslavia, the World Chess Championship match 1963 between Mikhail Botvinnik and Tigran Petrosian, he was editor of some well-known collections of games such as José Raúl Capablanca's and Réti's, was a well-respected author. He was editor of British Chess Magazine from 1938 to 1940, its overseas editor throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Golombek translated several chess books from Russian into English. On the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Golombek was in Buenos Aires, competing in the Chess Olympiad for Britain alongside C. H. O'D.
Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry. They returned to the UK, were soon recruited into Bletchley Park, the wartime codebreaking centre. Golombek worked in Hut 8, the section responsible for solving German Naval Enigma, moving to another section in October/November 1942. After the war he lived at Chalfont St Giles, he was unusual among public figures in replying with care to letters from unknown persons, such as young schoolboys, from this address. Golombek represented England nine times in chess Olympiads, he earned the title of International Master in 1950 and was awarded an HonoraryGrandmaster title in 1985. He was the first British player to qualify for an Interzonal tournament. Golombek studied philology at King's College London, having been a pupil at Wilson's Grammar School, Camberwell, he was appointed OBE in the first to be so honoured for services to chess. Golombek's Encyclopedia of Chess, edited by Golombek, 1977, Batsford/Crown, ISBN 0-517-53146-1 Golombek, H.. The Game of Chess. Penguin.
A History of Chess, 1976, Routledge & Kegan Paul, ISBN 0-7100-8266-5 The Art of the Middle Game, Penguin, ISBN 0-14-046102-7 Modern Opening Chess Strategy, 1959, Pitman Reti's Best Games of Chess, annotated by H. Golombek, 1954, republished 1974 Instructions to Young Chess Players, 1958, Pitman, ISBN 0-273-48550-4 Capablanca's 100 Best Games, 1970, G. Bell and Sons The World Chess Championship 1948, David McKay Company Harry Golombek player profile and games at Chessgames.com Translated Penguin Book - at Penguin First Editions reference site of early first edition Penguin Books
Henry Dudeney
Henry Ernest Dudeney was an English author and mathematician who specialised in logic puzzles and mathematical games. He is known as one of the country's foremost creators of mathematical puzzles. Dudeney was born in the village of Mayfield, East Sussex, one of six children of Gilbert and Lucy Dudeney, his grandfather, John Dudeney, was well shepherd. Dudeney learned to play chess at an early age, continued to play throughout his life; this led to a marked interest in the composition of puzzles. Chess problems in particular fascinated him during his early years. Although Dudeney spent his career in the Civil Service, he continued to devise various problems and puzzles. Dudeney's first puzzle contributions were submissions to newspapers and magazines under the pseudonym of "Sphinx." Much of this earlier work was a collaboration with American puzzlist Sam Loyd. Dudeney contributed puzzles under his real name to publications such as The Weekly Dispatch, The Queen and Cassell's Magazine. For twenty years, he had a successful column, "Perplexities", in The Strand Magazine, edited by the former editor of Tit-Bits, George Newnes.
Dudeney continued to exchange puzzles with fellow recreational mathematician Sam Loyd for a while, but broke off the correspondence and accused Loyd of stealing his puzzles and publishing them under his own name. Some of Dudeney's most famous innovations were his 1903 success at solving the Haberdasher's Puzzle and publishing the first known crossnumber puzzle, in 1926, he has been credited with discovering new applications of digital roots. Dudeney was a leading exponent of verbal arithmetic puzzles, it had been claimed that he was the inventor of verbal arithmetic. This was refuted by the counter example of a verbal arithmetic puzzle published in the US in 1864. Omission of detailed puzzle rules in the cited farm journal, suggests they were popular in America by 1864, when Dudeney was 7 years old; the popularity of these puzzles guarantees they'd be well known by to Sam Loyd, an American puzzler and early Dudeney puzzle collaborator. Loyd has gained notoriety for his own claims of invention now exposed as false.
He claimed to have invented the verbal arithmetic puzzle. For another example of Loyd's pervasive deceit, see 15 puzzle. Dudeney experienced Loyd's duplicity and intellectual theft first hand publicly equating Loyd with the Devil. Both Dudeney and Loyd were featured by Martin Gardner in his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American—Loyd in August 1957 and Dudeney in June 1958. In 1884 Dudeney married Alice Whiffin, she became a well known writer who published many novels as well as a number of short stories in Harper's Magazine under the name "Mrs. Henry Dudeney". In her day, she was compared to Thomas Hardy for her portrayals of regional life; the income generated by her books was important to the Dudeney household, her fame gained them entry to both literary and court circles. After losing their first child at the age of four months in 1887, the Dudeneys had one daughter, Margery Janet, she married Christopher Fulleylove, son of John Fulleylove and one of an esteemed family of English artists.
The Fulleyloves emigrated to North America, first living in Canada and settling first in Oakland and New York. They had three sons: John Gabriel, James Shirley, Julian John. Alice's personal diaries were edited by Diana Crook and published in 1998 under the title A Lewes Diary: 1916–1944, they give a lively picture of her attempts to balance her literary career with her marriage to her brilliant but volatile husband. In April 1930, Dudeney died of throat cancer in Lewes, where he and his wife had moved in 1914 after a period of separation to rekindle their marriage. Alice Dudeney died on 21 November 1945, after a stroke. Both are buried in the Lewes town cemetery, their grave is marked by a copy of an 18th-century Sussex sandstone obelisk, which Alice had copied after Ernest's death to serve as their mutual tombstone. The Canterbury Puzzles Amusements in Mathematics The World's Best Word Puzzles Modern Puzzles Puzzles and Curious Problems A Puzzle-Mine Dudeney number Works by Henry Ernest Dudeney at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Henry Dudeney at Internet Archive The Haberdasher Puzzle O'Connor, John J..
Profile
Chess
Chess is a two-player strategy board game played on a chessboard, a checkered gameboard with 64 squares arranged in an 8×8 grid. The game is played by millions of people worldwide. Chess is believed to be derived from the Indian game chaturanga some time before the 7th century. Chaturanga is the ancestor of the Eastern strategy games xiangqi and shogi. Chess reached Europe by the 9th century, due to the Umayyad conquest of Hispania; the pieces assumed their current powers in Spain in the late 15th century with the introduction of "Mad Queen Chess". Play does not involve hidden information; each player begins with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, eight pawns. Each of the six piece types moves differently, with the most powerful being the queen and the least powerful the pawn; the objective is to checkmate the opponent's king by placing it under an inescapable threat of capture. To this end, a player's pieces are used to attack and capture the opponent's pieces, while supporting each other.
During the game, play involves making exchanges of one piece for an opponent's similar piece, but finding and engineering opportunities to trade advantageously, or to get a better position. In addition to checkmate, a player wins the game if the opponent runs out of time. There are several ways that a game can end in a draw; the first recognized World Chess Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, claimed his title in 1886. Since 1948, the World Championship has been regulated by the Fédération Internationale des Échecs, the game's international governing body. FIDE awards life-time master titles to skilled players, the highest of, grandmaster. Many national chess organizations have a title system of their own. FIDE organizes the Women's World Championship, the World Junior Championship, the World Senior Championship, the Blitz and Rapid World Championships, the Chess Olympiad, a popular competition among international teams. FIDE is a member of the International Olympic Committee, which can be considered as a recognition of chess as a sport.
Several national sporting bodies recognize chess as a sport. Chess was included in 2010 Asian Games. There is a Correspondence Chess World Championship and a World Computer Chess Championship. Online chess has opened professional competition to a wide and varied group of players. Since the second half of the 20th century, chess engines have been programmed to play chess with increasing success, to the point where the strongest personal computers play at a higher level than the best human players. Since the 1990s, computer analysis has contributed to chess theory in the endgame; the IBM computer Deep Blue was the first machine to overcome a reigning World Chess Champion in a match when it defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997. The rise of strong chess engines runnable on hand-held devices has led to increasing concerns about cheating during tournaments. There are many variants of chess that utilize pieces, or boards. One of these, Chess960, incorporates standard rules but employs 960 different possible starting positions, thus negating any advantage in opening preparation.
Chess960 has gained widespread popularity as well as some FIDE recognition. The rules of chess are published by chess's international governing body, in its Handbook. Rules published by national governing bodies, or by unaffiliated chess organizations, commercial publishers, etc. may differ. FIDE's rules were most revised in 2017. Chess is played on a square board of eight columns; the 64 squares are referred to as light and dark squares. The chessboard is placed with a light square at the right-hand end of the rank nearest to each player. By convention, the game pieces are divided into white and black sets, the players are referred to as White and Black, respectively; each player begins the game with 16 pieces of the specified color, consisting of one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, eight pawns. The pieces are set out as shown in the diagram and photo, with each queen on a square of its own color. In competitive games, the colors are allocated by the organizers; the player with the white pieces moves first.
After the first move, players alternate turns. Pieces are moved to either an unoccupied square or one occupied by an opponent's piece, captured and removed from play. With the sole exception of en passant, all pieces capture by moving to the square that the opponent's piece occupies. A player may not make any move that would leave the player's own king under attack. A player cannot "pass" a turn. If the player to move has no legal move, the game is over; each piece has its own way of moving. In the diagrams, the dots mark the squares to which the piece can move if there are no intervening piece of either color; the king moves one square in any direction. The king has
Martin Gardner
Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer, with interests encompassing scientific skepticism, philosophy and literature—especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, G. K. Chesterton, he is recognized as 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 was regarded as one of the most important magicians of the twentieth century. He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers, he was a 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, 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 became a classic and 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. Gardner, son of a petroleum geologist father and an educator and artist mother, grew up in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma, his lifelong interest in puzzles started in his boyhood when his father gave him a copy of Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles and Conundrums. He attended the University of Chicago, where he 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, 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. 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, 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 and Present. 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, his wife Charlotte, their two sons and Tom, lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where he earned his living as a freelance author, publishing books with several different publishers, publishing hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles. Appropriately enough—given his interest in logic and mathematics—they lived on Euclid Avenue.
The year 1960 saw the original edition of the best-selling book of The Annotated Alice. In 1979, Gardner retired from Scientific American and he and his wife Charlotte moved to Hendersonville, North Carolina. Gardner never retired as an author, but continued to write math articles, sending them to The Mathematical Intelligencer, Math Horizons, The College Mathematics Journal, Scientific American, he revised some of his older books such as Origami and the Soma Cube. Charlotte died in 2000 and two years Gardner returned to Norman, where his son, James Gardner, was a professor of education at the University of Oklahoma, he died there on May 22, 2010. An autobiography — Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner — was published posthumously. Martin Gardner had a major impact on mathematics in the second half of the 20th century, his column was called "Mathematical Games" but it was much more than that. His writing introduced many readers to real mathematics for the first time in their lives.
The column lasted for 25 years and was read avidly by the generation of mathematicians and physicists who grew up in the years 1956 to 1981. It was the original inspiration for many of them to become scientists themselves. David Auerbach wrote: A case can be made, in purely practical terms, for Martin Gardner as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, his popularizations of science and mathematical games in Scientific American, over the 25 years he wrote for them, might have helped create more young mathematicians and computer scientists than any other single factor prior to the advent of the personal computer. Among the wide array of mathematicians, computer scientists, magicians, artists and other influential thinkers who inspired and were in turn inspired by Gardner are John Horton Conway, Bill Gosper, Ron Rivest, Richard K. Guy, Piet Hein, Ronald Graham, Donald Knuth, Robert Nozick, Lee Sallows, Scott Kim, M. C. Escher, Douglas Hofstadter, Roger Penrose, Ian Stewart, David A. Klarner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Elwyn R. Berlekamp, Solomon W. Golomb, Raymond Smullyan, James Randi, Persi Diaconis, Penn & Teller, Ray Hyman.
His admirers included such diverse people as W. H. Auden, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, the entire French literary group known as the Oulipo. Salvador Dali once sought him out to discuss four-dimensional hypercubes. Gardner wrote to M. C. Escher in 1961 to ask permission
