Martin Gardner, 1914-2010 R.I.P.
I was very sorry to get the news this morning (which I first saw on the invaluable Arts & Letters Daily site) that the science writer Martin Gardner died yesterday, age 95.
I say “science writer,” but Gardner was much more than your ordinary, run-of-the-mill scribe reporting on trends, discoveries, and better-living-through chemistry or space exploration.
I first encountered Gardner’s work in high school when I stumbled on The Annotated Alice, his splendid edition of Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I later discovered that he also published annotated editions of other works he admired, including The Wizard of Oz, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and several books by G. K. Chesterton, one of his favorite authors.
The many tributes that are beginning to pour in about this extraordinary man bear witness to his irrepressible energy and curiosity about the natural world. He wrote a veritable library of books — more than seventy — on mathematics, science, literature, and philosophy and related topics. One of my favorites is The Ambidextrous Universe — what an intriguing title! — about the properties and amazing prevalence of symmetry and “handedness” in the universe. Gardner also wrote hundreds — maybe thousands — of columns for Scientific American (for twenty-five years he wrote the magazine’s Mathematical Games column), The Skeptical Inquirer (where he indulged, delightfully, a passion for exposing the chicanery of pseudo-sceince), and other magazines, including, I am proud to say, The New Criterion, for which he wrote some dozen pieces over the last six or seven years.
I never met Gardner, but I got to know him telephonically and through letters (he didn’t use email) because of his work for The New Criterion and his endorsement of a book by the philosopher David Stove that I edited. It is a melancholy pleasure that what may be Gardner’s last published piece, a review of Amir Alexander’s Duel at Down: Heroes, Martyrs & the Rise of Modern Mathematics, will appear next week in our June issue. Gardner was full of praise for Alexander’s “marvelous history.” But he concludes with a wistful criticism that reveals something essential about his cast of mind. Alexander had prefaced his book with Keats’s famous couplet from Ode on a Grecian Urn:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all
We know on earth, and all ye need to know.
“Alas,” Gardner wrote, “the lines are almost menaingless. They are not all we know or need to know. Moreover, there are true mathematical theorems that are ugly, and there are beautiful ‘proofs’ that are false. T. S. Eliot surely spoke for most literary critics when he called Keats’s lines ‘a serious blemish on a beautiful poem.’”
Gardner combined to an unusual degree an openness to the inherent mystery of the universe with an impatience for mystification. He would have liked the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane’s comment that “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” At the same time, he devoted considerable energy to exposing the claims of partisans of the paranormal, “new-agers,” and other sentimentalizing renegades from the truth. In April, he published an article on Oprah Winfrey, the “gullible billionaire,” whose fondness for quack medicine threatens to tempt her many fans into useless, even dangerous, medical fads.
“Winfrey’s enthusiasm for New Age books reached its apex,” Gardner reports,
when she promoted the monumental idiocy of The Secret. It can be described as a hilarious parody of books by Norman Vincent Peale. Instead of God working miracles, the universe itself does it. The Secret teaches that the universe consists of a vibrating energy that can be tapped into with positive thoughts, allowing you to obtain anything you desire—happiness, love, and of course fabulous wealth. Want to lose weight? Then stop having fat thoughts and think thin! Want to become wealthy? Stop thinking poor thoughts. Think rich!
I’m sorry to hear of the passing of Gardner. I’m also curious to see what he has to say about “Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs & the Rise of Modern Mathematics” because the editorial reviews at Amazon are ludicrous, unbelievably so. Typo alert, it is “Dawn”, not “Down”.
He had enough material for a second annotation of “Alice” and it is well worth finding.For that matter, anything by Gardner is well worth finding. I wouldn’t attempt to add to Roger’s tribute.
Great tribute! Never read his work. Know I want to.
Thank You
Three points:
1). I dislike the euphemism “passed away” for “died”, but in Gardner’s case, having lived to 95 in a life full of achievement and fun, perhaps it’s appropriate, for once. He certainly had his time, and used it very well.
2). Plato said that one cannot be called happy until they die, otherwise some disaster can always strike. If that is so, now we can say Gardner was happy.
3). About Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”. Claiming Keats said that is my second-least-favorite literary blunder, right after #1, the claim that Juliet, saying “wherefore art thou Romeo”, is looking for him (“Wherefore” mean “why”, not “where” — she’s asking him, or fate, why he had to be a Montague while she’s a Capulet.)
As W. H. Auden pointed out, Keats never said anything of the kind. It’s the GRECIAN URN that says “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” — and from the poem it is quite clear Keats strongly disagrees with that sentiment, seeing it a an unfeeling, cold response to life!
“Passed away” is appropriate in Gardner’s case, because, you might be surprised to learn, Gardner was a “philosophical theist”. Which is to say, he was not an atheist; he believed in God and an afterlife.
Perhaps, Skeptic, a suitable replacement euphemism, one Gardner would have surely approved of, is “handed in his dinner pail.”
That’s from a poem by Wodehouse, about a goat (“so fine and frail”) who took a slug betwixt the horns.
Thank you for writing that fine appreciation.
Having been brought up and lived as a young man as a mathematician and physicist, Martin Gardner’s almost universal influence on myself and my peers’ childhood was too obvious and trite to be even worth much mentioning amongst us. Only with the tributes pouring in now does one realize that he was–as he deserved–almost as appreciated by those in the other of the Two Cultures, as he was in ours.
I never met Martin Gardner,but I first learned of him when I read, at the age of about 14, his “Fads and Fallacies in the name of Science”, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
About 1980, I met James Randi, who told me that Martin Gardner drove the paranormalists crazy: he had no academic position for them to undermine.
Gardner was a man of expansive curiosity and equally as expansive intellectual and spiritual depth. Although you did not mention this particular work his “The Flight of Peter Fromm” is as poignant and “dead on” a rendering of an individual struggle with faith and reason as I’ve ever read. I was given the book to read before embarking upon a graduate degree in theology and it’s pages have periodically informed my intellectual, spiritual and theological journey ever since. I almost now reflexively recall some part of Martin’s own journey whenever I come upon a passage in Tillich or Barth that stirs the now long-slumbering fundamentalist in me.
The good he did lives beyond him. Thank God somebody debunked that pernicious “Secret” book. It’s a slap in the face to anyone who has been dragged all unwilling into the underworld of tragedy.
Whoever said “only the good die young” was not thinking of Martin Gardner. A good eulogy on a good life. I need to finish reading some of his books on my bookshelf.
All I can add are murmured ‘Hear, hear’ and ‘Amen’.