I'm deeply saddened to learn at this turn of events. It had to happen eventually, and every week or three that would occur to me, such a presence he has been in my life. When I was 12 in 1959, someone gave me as a present his "Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions". I have never loved a book as much as that one. He was an important inspiration to my becoming a mathematician. I read his Mathematical Games column religiously. And was deeply impressed with his other writings, which I now feel a strong desire to read in full (though that would take a few years). He is a role model for me: I aspire to be at least as incisive a philosopher and as inspiring a mathematics explicator as he was. (That's an impossible goal, but still worth aiming for.) We exchanged about four letters, the last one or two rather long, and one phone call (after he erroneously wrote a positive quote used on the jacket of Marilyn Vos Savant's disaster, "The World's Most Famous Math Problem", about Fermat's Last Theorem). George Hart wrote: << (Not fun.) It is with great sadness that I report Martin Gardner died today. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/22/martin-gardner-191... When I visited him last October in Norman, OK, he was sharp, alert, and happy to offer a list of great ideas he thought would be good for the Museum of Mathematics. He demonstrated some card tricks, calculator tricks, and a rope illusion. He told a number of interesting stories about his life and said he was starting to work on his autobiography --- a book project which he predicted would take three years to complete. I thought that it took enormous vision to start a three-year project at the age of 95 and am sad that it will never be finished.
________________________________________________________________________________________ "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." --Groucho Marx