julesjones: (Default)
Ladies and gentlemen, please raise your glasses in a toast to the life and works of Martin Gardner. He died yesterday, after a long and fruitful life during which he showed many, many people that mathematics could be *fun* -- and in doing so, helped a little to shape the world as we know it.

I spent many happy hours in my high school library browsing the back copies of Scientific American, mostly to read his Mathematical Games columns. As a teenager I nigh on wore out their copies of his books, and as an adult have three of them in my personal library -- and more recreational mathematics books by other authors about concepts I first met in his column.

I haven't made a flexagon for years. Time to remedy that...

Wikipedia biography, with the usual Wikipedia caveats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gardner
julesjones: (Default)
A commenter on Making Lightnotes that there is an excellent article on Islamic tile design in the current issue of Saudi Aramco World, including the Moorish designers' discovery of quasi-non-periodic tiling rather a long time ago.

He also linked to a fascinating article on the history and problems of typesetting Arabic script. If you're interested in either calligraphy or the geeky aspects of typesetting this is well worth a read.

I think I must have a ferret around this magazine's website when I have more time...

Profile

julesjones: (Default)
julesjones

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
4567 8910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags