He had a gift for taking complicated mathematics and explaining it so that even a high school student could appreciate its beauty and import. More than that, when you finished reading a Martin Gardner article, you wanted to experiment with the mathematics on your own and learn more about the ideas he presented.

A common phrase you’ll here people use today is “I’m no good at math” or “I just can’t understand mathematics”. It frustrates me a little when people tell me this. Math is no different than any other human endeavor (like art or music or athleticism) in that (1) almost anyone can do the basics and (2) you won’t really know how good you are at it until you’ve put in at least a few hundred hours of effort. Almost all of the people who tell me they are “hopeless” when it comes to math have reached that conclusion without ever really understanding what mathematics really is (let alone doing some).

Martin Gardner is one of the reasons why I never became a person who thought that learning math was beyond my capabilities. In fact, I’ve never met anyone familiar with his mathematical writings who ever thought learning math was “hopeless”. I can think of no better legacy.

On the other hand . . . .

There is a school of thought that people do really not die when their bodies cease to function. I’m not talking about the supernatural, here. In the Discworld books, the people of the Ramtops are said to share this belief, and the way Terry Pratchett put it was that the span of a person’s living years is just the tiniest slice of their entire life. They do not completely pass until all memory of them has passed, until every project they started has stopped, until the things they built have crumbled to dust, and until all trace of them is gone. Considering Gardner’s contributions to skepticism, I think he will be with us for a very long time to come.

This is just a reminder that modern skepticism has been around quite a while. Although I think that skeptical thinking versus nonsense has been around for as long as we have been learning about and exploring our world.

I still have the two letters I received from Gardner in response to a couple of questions I asked him by mail. He used a typewriter rather than a computer printer, and was very gracious in trying to help me with one skeptical investigation or another.

Finally, I have an odd though fairly meaningless connection with him – but it has always pleased me. We have the same birthday, October 21st, and I plan to continue my tradition of celebrating Gardner’s day along with my own.