American journalist and writer known as one of the premier authors of mathematical and logical puzzles and conundrums. Although Gardner spent part of his career as a reporter for the Tulsa Tribune and as a contributing editor to the children’s magazine Humpty Dumpty, his greatest exposure came through his 1957-82 column in Scientific American, which introduced many people to the joys of mathematical and logical puzzles. Many of his puzzles and columns from the magazine were so popular that they were collected and published separately in book form.
Gardner is also a professional science writer and ranks with the late Isaac Asimov (1920-92) as one of the greatest explainers of science to nonscientists. Relativity for the Millions (1962), for example, looks at Einstein’s concept of the relativity of time, space, and matter in a way that is easily understandable by most readers, and The Ambidextrous Universe (1964; revised edition, 1990) discusses symmetry and other aspects of astronomy. Other volumes explore literary history, providing sidelights on famous literary works such as The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was (1957), The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1960), and The Annotated Night before Christmas (1991).