I grew up with Martin Gardner's books (of which there are many!) of puzzles, math and magic. From them I learned so many simple and elegant tricks and techniques that I use to this day.
It's largely due to Gardner's writings that I do what I do today, and I love what I do. I had an afternoon with him in March and it was one of the truly special events in my life. I haven't the words to express how I felt then.
Or how I feel now. My world has grown a little darker knowing he's no longer in it.
Martin's books changed my life. In one particularly introverted and dark period of my adolescence I poured through them at the library. Thinking through hexaflexagons, the game of life, multiple dimensions, and many more ideas kept me from brooding over my troubles.
He was one of the few Western authors translated and widely published in USSR, so his books were very popular.. I destroyed a few reading cover-to-cover, making notes, etc.
There's nobody out there who could convey the enthusiasm for science like him. He could take the most difficult topics and talk about them in a very accessible ways, so even a 13 year old like me would understand it and become interested.
I mainly remember him from his puzzle columns in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. I see now that I was missing out on a lot - sad to realize it because he died.
Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914 – May 22, 2010)[1] was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, pseudoscience, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, and published over 70 books.[2].
A lot of people first learned about Lisp from [Martin Gardner]. In fact, I bet more people learned about Lisp from him than anyone else.
Your comment prompted me to do a Google search on Gardner and Lisp. Are you sure you don't mean Douglas Hofstadter, Gardner's successor as Scientific American columnist?
When you think about a lot of what's considered to be "cool" math, logic or CS stuff, there's a good chance that Martin Gardner helped introduce it to people. He's up there with Douglas Hofstadter on my list of people who taught me that those things could be interesting (and even beautiful), even if most schools taught them to me as a disconnected set of silly rules to memorize for a multiple-choice test.
It's largely due to Gardner's writings that I do what I do today, and I love what I do. I had an afternoon with him in March and it was one of the truly special events in my life. I haven't the words to express how I felt then.
Or how I feel now. My world has grown a little darker knowing he's no longer in it.