conway game of life gardner scientific american

#Conway game of life gardner scientific american professional#

Today, Gardner's spirit is alive in Hart and the hundreds of others who have been influenced by his approach to mathematical thinking. Now fast-forward 50 years and say you're me, and the generation of people inspired by Martin Gardner are now the people inspiring you, so he's your math inspiration grandfather, and now you yourself are in the business of mathematically inspiring people, and you want them to be aware of their math inspiration heritage. Maybe other people would like to know about this flexagon thing.' So you write an article for Scientific American and soon you've landed yourself a gig writing a regular column about recreational mathematics called 'Mathematical Games,' and it's a huge success and gets hundreds of comments, I mean, letters, and there's nothing else like your column, and all the cool people are inspired by you, and you're pretty much the reason why people know about things like tangrams and Conway's Game of Life and the work of M.C. And you're thinking, 'Hey, this is awesome. Anyway, your friend shows you something you've never seen before: a big flexagon he's made out of cloth. You're an amateur magician hanging out at your friend's place talking about magician stuff. Now fast-forward 15 years and be Martin Gardner. She puts it best around the 3:10 minute mark of the second video: Hart has her own unique voice, but she has clearly been influenced by Gardner's lighthearted, joyful approach to beautiful mathematics. The third video is a hexaflexagon safety guide, featuring instructions for 'disarming' a hexaflexagon and some tasty-looking hexaflexaMexican food. We learn about flexagon 'Feynman diagrams' (no, not those Feynman diagrams), 'Tuckerman's traverse' and the connection to Martin Gardner. In the next video, we find out who they are: Princeton graduate students Arthur Stone, Bryant Tuckerman and Richard Feynman (yes, that Richard Feynman) and math instructor John Tukey.

In her typical fast-talking, wildly creative way, Hart draws us into the flexigating fun.Īround the 3:50 minute mark of the first video, Hart introduces us to the Flexagon Committee (motto: 'to explore the mysteries of flexigation'). The videos contain a fictionalized account of the discovery of flexagons, also chronicled in Martin Gardner's first recreational math column for Scientific American.

#Conway game of life gardner scientific american professional#

Vi Hart, the world's premier professional “mathemusician,” has created three videos about 'hexaflexagons' in honor of Martin Gardner's birthday. In a Science Talk podcast shortly after Gardner's death, Douglas Hofstadter, author of the popular math book Gödel, Escher, Bach, said that for himself and many others, ' Scientific American was just the wrapping for Martin Gardner's column.' Although he had little mathematical training, his 1956-1981 Scientific American column 'Mathematical Games' has had a huge impact on the way people view math. Gardner (1914-2010) is a legend in recreational (and professional) mathematics circles. October 21 is the anniversary of Martin Gardner's birth.