http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/us/24gardner.html
“Martin Gardner is one of the great intellects produced in this country in the 20th century,” said Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist.
I didn’t know he helped found CSICOP.
I was an avid reader of his Scientific American columns back in the 70s, as well as those of his later successor Douglas Hofstadter. It’s always sad to lose such a brilliant mind.
I was an avid reader of his Scientific American columns back in the 70s, as well as those of his later successor Douglas Hofstadter. It’s always sad to lose such a brilliant mind.
Yeah, me too. My mom was a chemistry teacher, so it wasn’t odd to have a subscription to S.A.
I found out recently that Gardner published a collection titled The Unexpected Hanging and Other Mathematical Diversions. The title essay, obviously, refers to the same paradox that was discussed in the recent hangman thread. Since Gardner was a pretty bright guy, I was naturally curious to find out what he had said about the hangman’s paradox, so I ordered it from amazon. The book came in yesterday, and I did an initial skim of the article last night. I was somewhat disappointed to find out that I was not the first to discover the solution. (Not entirely surprised, though, since this paradox is well-trod territory.) In fact, the solution was first presented by no less a personage than the famous Harvard logician/philosopher W. V. Quine. (According to wikipedia, “a recent poll conducted among philosophers named Quine one of the five most important philosophers of the past two centuries.”) Quine’s and Gardner’s conclusions about the problem, not surprisingly, matched mine closely.
The article also including some intriguing information about the history of the puzzle. After I’ve had time to read it more carefully and assimilate it (probably not until at least this weekend), I plan to post more details and quotations from it, as an addendum to the hangman thread.