Martin Gardner (1914 – 2010)

Written By: evan on May 23, 2010 11 Comments

On Saturday, we lost a man who loved mathematics. He wasn’t responsible for any specific theories or concepts. He wasn’t a great theoretician or an iconoclast. Nevertheless, Martin Gardner was responsible for popularizing the idea of recreational mathematics. In fact, his Mathematical Games column, which appeared in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, had a great influence on popular mathematics. Particularly noteworthy is his article from October of 1970, which introduced the world to John Conway’s Game of Life, and initiated a tsunami of interest in cellular automata that has effected music as well as many other fields.

This month we consider Conway’s latest brainchild, a fantastic solitaire pastime he calls “life”. Because of its analogies with the rise, fall and alternations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called “simulation games”–games that resemble real-life processes. To play life you must have a fairly large checkerboard and a plentiful supply of flat counters of two colors…

The basic idea is to start with a simple configuration of counters (organisms), one to a cell, then observe how it changes as you apply Conway’s “genetic laws” for births, deaths, and survivals. Conway chose his rules carefully, after a long period of experimentation, to meet three desiderata:

1. There should be no initial pattern for which there is a simple proof that the population can grow without limit.

2. There should be initial patterns that apparently do grow without limit.

3. There should be simple initial patterns that grow and change for a considerable period of time before coming to end in three possible ways: fading away completely (from overcrowding or becoming too sparse), settling into a stable configuration that remains unchanged thereafter, or entering an oscillating phase in which they repeat an endless cycle of two or more periods.

In brief, the rules should be such as to make the behavior of the population unpredictable. [1]

This article spawned a massive amount of research into making cellular automata into musical automata. This notably includes work by Eduardo Reck Miranda and Peter Beyls. Less notably, it includes about a thousand youtube and vimeo videos.

I am personally grateful to Martin Gardner for showing the world that math can be fun.

Notes

[1] Martin Gardner. “Mathematical Games: The fantastic combinations of John Conway’s new solitaire game ‘life’.” Scientific American. Iss. 223 (October 1970): 120.

[2] Yam, Philip. “Profile: Martin Gardner, the Mathematical Gamester (1914-2010).” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=profile-of-martin-gardner. Accessed on 5/23/2010.