Jules Jones

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