This episode is presented by eBay.

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business sellers. This ises vehicles and business sellers.

This is a special edition of Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American. I'm Steve Murski. Martin Gardner died this past Saturday, May 22nd. He was 95 years old.

And he is still probably the person most associated with Scientific American Magazine.

His mathematical games column ran from 1956 to 1981. He also published more than 70 books

and was a truly beloved figure around the world. Douglas Hofstetter is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gerdl Escher Bach and took over Martin's

column, changing the name to the anagram, Metamagical Themas.

On Monday, May 24th, I called Hofstetter in Paris to talk about Martin Gardner.

You wrote back in 1992, I came to understand that there were thousands of people spread

all around the world, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, computer scientists, on and

on, who thought of Martin Gardner's column not merely as a feature of scientific American,

but as its very heart and soul.

How was Martin the heart and soul of the magazine?

Well, when I came to know Martin Gardner's column,

I was probably on the order of 14 years old,

and it might have been a little bit earlier.

And I will always remember that uh... the excitement that there would be if

i went to the mailbox of my parents house and found the copy of scientific

...