MARTIN GARDNER

POLYMATH

21-10-1914 - 22-5-2010

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

MARTIN Gardner, who teased brains with mathematics puzzles for a quarter-century and who indulged his own restless curiosity by writing more than 70 books on topics as diverse as magic, philosophy and the nuances of Alice in Wonderland, has died in Norman, Oklahoma. He was 95.

Gardner also wrote fiction, poetry, literary and film criticism, as well as puzzle books. He was a leading voice in refuting pseudoscientific theories, from ESP to flying saucers. He was so prolific and wide-ranging in his interests that critics speculated that there just had to be more than one of him.

Gardner was admired by the poet W. H. Auden, futurist and author Arthur C. Clarke, mathematician and biologist Jacob Bronowski, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, and astronomer, astrophysicist, author and cosmologist Carl Sagan. Vladimir Nabokov mentioned him in his novel Ada as ''an invented philosopher''. An asteroid is named for him.

Gardner responded that his life was not all that interesting, really. ''It's lived mainly inside my brain,'' he said in 1993.

His mathematical writings intrigued a generation of mathematicians, but he never studied mathematics after school. If it seemed the only thing this polymath could not do was play music on a saw, rest assured that he could, and quite well.

''Martin Gardner is one of the great intellects produced in this country in the 20th century,'' said Dr Douglas Hofstadter, the American cognitive scientist.

Gardner's was a clarifying intelligence. In Annotated Alice (1960), he literally rained on the parade of his hero, Lewis Carroll. Carroll writes of a ''golden afternoon'' in the first line of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a reference to an actual day rowing on the Thames. Gardner found that the day, July 4, 1862, was, in truth, ''cool and rather wet''.

The title of a book he published in 2000 was calculated to tweak religious fundamentalists - Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? - suggesting that the first man and woman had umbilical cords.

One leading American reviewer described Gardner as ''self-educated, opinionated, cranky and utterly unafraid of embarrassment''.

Gardner was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his father, a petroleum geologist, started an oil company. As a boy, he liked magic tricks, chess, science and collecting mechanical puzzles.

Gardner majored in philosophy at Chicago University, from where he graduated in 1936. In 1937 he returned to Oklahoma to be an assistant editor of The Tulsa Tribune at $US15 a week. Quickly bored, he returned to the university, where he worked in press relations and moonlighted selling magic kits.

He joined the US Navy and served on a destroyer. While doing night-watch duty, he thought up crazy plots for stories, including The Horse on the Escalator, which he sold to Esquire magazine.

After a stint as editor of Humpty Dumpty, a children's magazine, Gardner began a long relationship with Scientific American with an article in 1956 on hexaflexagons - strips of paper that can be folded in certain ways to reveal faces besides the two that were originally on the front and back.

When the publisher suggested that he write a column about mathematical games, he jumped at the chance. By his account, Gardner then rushed out to secondhand bookstores to find texts about mathematic puzzles, an approach he used for years to keep just ahead of his monthly deadline. ''The number of puzzles I've invented you can count on your fingers,'' he said last year.

Gardner resigned from the magazine in 1981. Two years later he began a column in Skeptical Inquirer titled Notes of a Fringe Watcher, which he continued to write until 2002. He had already begun beating this drum, debunking pseudoscience, in his book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.

In The New York Review of Books in 1982, Stephen Jay Gould called Gardner ''the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against mysticism and anti-intellectualism''.

Gardner wrestled with religion in essays and in a novel and ultimately found no reason to believe in anything religious except a human desire to avoid ''deep-seated despair''. So, he said, he believed in God.

He is survived by two sons and three grandchildren.

NEW YORK TIMES