“Gathering for Gardner” Celebrates the Author of Mathematical Games

April 5, 2010 

Luminaries from the worlds of mathematics, science, and other fields gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, in late March for the “Gathering for Gardner” (G4G), a four-day conference to honor Martin Gardner, a famous popularizer of mathematics and science.

Martin Gardner became known for illuminating the beauty of mathematics and logic in discussions of fractals, origami, optical illusions, puzzles, and pseudoscience. An author of 65 books, he challenged readers to discover how mathematics and logic are interwoven through the world. His influence at the "Gathering," therefore, was manifest.

"Gathering for Gardner" has been held every two years since 1996. Each event is named G4Gn, with n replaced by the number in the series. The event in March was the ninth, or  G4G9. Gardner, now 96-years-old, no longer travels to the events.

In a recent article about the event, The Wall Street Journal reported the gathering’s atmosphere is “like that of a group of hobbyists, but you learn from almost everyone something you can apply to your own field."

Robert P. Crease, writing for the Journal, described the atmosphere of the event:

“On a Japanese-landscaped hillside at the outskirts of Atlanta, several clusters of people were constructing mathematically inspired sculptures of metal, bamboo and balloons. Nearby, a magician showed a mathematician how to "throw" a knot. Others had their photographs taken in an optical illusion they had built, an "impossible box" that from one perspective made people look simultaneously behind and inside it. Around a goldfish pond, groups did puzzles, origami, juggling, and card tricks. A magician, a philosopher and a software engineer argued about Wittgenstein.”

Participants included: Swedish magician Lennart Green; Princeton University mathematician John Conway, designer of the cellular automaton "Game of Life"; Stephen Wolfram, author of A New Kind of Science, who demonstrated his latest creation, the search engine Wolfram|Alpha; mathematician-programmer Bill Gosper, considered the founder of the hacker community; Pablos Holman, from Intellectual Ventures; and Al Seckel, a former Caltech cognitive neuroscientist, who used sensory illusions to demonstrate how humans "map" incoming information.

Source: The Wall Street Journal (April 2, 2010).