Mathematical games
by Martin Gardner · first published 2005
32% recommend68% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Collected puzzle and recreational math columns introducing Conway's Game of Life, fractals, Penrose tiles, flexagons and polyominoes; often recommended for curious readers and anyone who enjoys playful math.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Searchable source that brings together 30 years of Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column which ran in Scientific American from 1956 to 1986.
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> Metamagical Themes It's Metamagica Themas, I think - an anagram of 'Mathematical Games'; the Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American which proceeded it. A lovely book.
on “Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach” ↗…glassware. It doesn’t take too much equipment to get started. Sadly, the old Amateur Scientist columns are hard to come by unless you have access to a library with Sci American going back to 1952. (The old Mathematical Games columns by the late Martin Gardner are great too. I first read about public key encryption just a few months after Rivest, Shamir and Adleman wrote the MIT memo on it because it appeared in the August…
on “Caltech glassblower's retirement has scientists sighing (2016)” ↗…know it well, so push through even if it sometimes is not a lot of fun. If you need something fun while going through the high school stuff, take a look at the books that collect Martin Gardner's old "Mathematical Games" columns from Scientific American. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16506771 [2] https://www.ck12.org/student/
on “Ask HN: How to self-learn math?” ↗If you're thinking of getting the annotated version, another classic in the same spirit is The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner. It exposes a lot of double entendres, mathematical games, and other historical stuff about Alice in Wonderland that shows how much of a playful mathematician Lewis Carroll was.
on “Flatland: A Forgivably Flat Classic” ↗I first read about making one's own cloud chamber as a kid. I used to read old issues of Scientific American for the Mathematical Games columns written by Martin Gardner, which I highly recommend, and the Amature Scientist column written by a series of authors over the years, starting in 1928. The projects were amazing. My favorites…
on “Building a Cloud Chamber (Cosmic Ray Detector)” ↗Mathematical Games, by Martin Gardner. EDIT: Distractions abound so I hit submit before forgetting. Why: Martin Gardner wrote on a variety of mathematical topics in fields such as geometry, graph theory, number theory,…
on “The Parallel Climbers Puzzle” ↗…Gardner's articles themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gardner_bibliography#%2... - That's a list of the books (and on that page many other things) collecting Gardner's Scientific American "Mathematical Games" articles. https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/mathematics/s... - First 4 of the reprints available here (or a bookseller of your choice).
on “Hexaflexagons [video] (2012)” ↗Martin Gardner wrote a monthly column in Scientific American called Mathematical Games. He introduced me and other readers to: Conway's Game of Life, fractals, Penrose Tiles, flexagons, M. C. Escher, Godel, Escher, Bach, polyoninoes and many other logic problems. There was a learning AI…
on “Ask HN: Which books evoked the love towards your favorite subjects?” ↗Scientific American needs to look in a mirror. There was a time when they gave meaningful direction to young readers. Albert G. Ingalls, "The Back Yard Astronomer." Martin Gardner, "Mathematical Games" C. L. Stong. "The Amateur Scientist" After Stongs death, SciAm displayed a halfhearted attempt to keep a few back pages, but around 2000 they dumped the whole idea of citizen science. Despite the launch…
on “"Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Making Sci-Fi Real"” ↗…"new math" movement. We learned about sets in first grade. Proofs were introduced fairly early. There were problems for which "no answer" was the correct answer. If you could find a collection of the Mathematical Games articles from Scientific American, those were entertaining and required little background knowledge, but conveyed the fun of math. Geometry is a good subject because it doesn't have very many prerequisites…
on “The Mensa Reading List for Grades 9-12” ↗…lecture about the gulf between the sciences and the humanities. The programming language COBOL was developed. Martin Gardner published the Three Prisoners Problem, a probability theory paradox, in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American. Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published Searching for Interstellar Communications, a foundational work for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, in the journal…
on ““You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”” ↗…graduate-level pure math texts (the subject of that post). I own and love the book, and did a lot of pure math in my math undergrad degree. But SFM is closer to the tradition of Martin Gardner's long-running "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American than real higher pure math education. I think that's because it hinges on giving you tools to "hack" problems in physics, geometry and calculus that leverage intuition…
on “Street-Fighting Math: Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving (2010) [pdf]” ↗Back in the 70's, Martin Gardner published an article in his Mathematical Games column in the SciAm, about visualising rotating hyperspheres and hypercubes. The way I remember it, his imaginary friend Dr. Morpheus (or something) had shown him colour animations of these rotating objects.…
on “A high-dimensional sphere spilling out of a high-dimensional cube” ↗…numbers to be bound in a high-quality encyclopedia-like hardcover binding. I remember devouring these venerable volumes as a kid, looking especially for the Martin Gardner, and later Douglas Hofstadter, mathematical games. But also for all the extremely cool news about space exploration, chemistry research, biology, plans for future nuclear fusion. Now it seems to be nothing of the sort (I don't talk about this stupid…
on “Why the Term Jedi Is Problematic for Justice/Equity/Diversity/Inclusion Programs” ↗Off the subject but on this site: A list of Martin Gardner Puzzle Books: Martin Gardner's Collections of "Mathematical Games" Columns http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/books/gardner.html
on “3998-byte executable reduced to 45 bytes” ↗