I find myself shedding tears for a man I never met, who lived on the other side of the world, with whom I corresponded briefly on only a couple of occasions [map-folding and Penrose tiling, since you didn't ask]. On one such his reply was accompanied by a substantial parcel of his books, an unlooked-for and unexpected gift which still occupies my shelves on those occasions when I can prise them back from people who regularly walk off with them. What is most astonishing to me about this unassuming giant is how he managed evidently to combine a verisimilitude of personal friendship to heaven knows how many thousand complete strangers, with what can only have been a prodigious work ethic. Quite apart from any more elevated considerations, simply to produce the amount of accurate, high quality material for which he was (as far as I know) single-handedly responsible must have demanded a submerged iceberg of tightly organised survey research which defeats the imagination. He would never admit to actually being a mathematician, but his address for many years 10 Euclid, Hastings-on-Hudson gives the game away. You never fooled me there, old man! Fred Lunnon On 5/23/10, George W. Hart <george@georgehart.com> 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.
George Hart http://momath.org http://georgehart.com
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