ABSTRACT
It was in high school that I decided to be a mathematician. The credit (or, perhaps, blame!) for this can be laid squarely on madiematical competitions and Martin Gardner. The competitions led me to believe I had a talent, and for an adolescent unsure of himself and his place in die world, diis was no small diing. But Martin Gardner, dirough his books and columns, led me to die more important lesson diat, above all else, madiemadcs is fun. The contrast widi my teachers in school was striking. In fact, diere seemed to be two completely different kinds of madiemadcs: die kind you learned in school and die kind you learned from Martin Gardner. The former was tilled widi one dreary numerical problem after anodier, while die latter was filled widi flights of fancy and wonderment. From Martin Gardner I learned of logical and language paradoxes, such as die condemned prisoner who wasn’t supposed to know the day of his execution (I don’t diink I understand diis even now!), I learned sneaky ways of doing difficult computations (a round bullet shot dirough the center of a sphere comes to mind), I learned of hexaflexagons (I still have somewhere in my cluttered office a model of a rotating ring I made while in high school), and I learned of islands populated only by trudi tellers and liars, bodi groups being beer lovers. This colorful world stood in stark contrast to school madiematics. I figured diat if I could just stick it out long enough, sooner or later I would get to die fun stuff.
