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From: palsing on 26 May 2010 23:47
On May 26, 8:02 pm, Quadibloc <jsav...(a)ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
> On May 26, 6:55 pm, Anthony Ayiomamitis <anth...(a)perseus.gr> wrote:
>
> > This is indeed very sad news!  The first thing I would read with each
> > new issue was his column.
>
> And this was true for me as well, as for many others.
>
> John Savard

And the same for me. In fact, when I was in my early teens, I couldn't
get through the first half of most of the articles in SA, they were
simply over my head at the time, for the most part, but I learned a
tremendous amount of math from Mr. Gardener.

I really liked the 'Dr. Matrix' columns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Irving_Joshua_Matrix), which highlighted the weird and wonderful side
of math. One unusual piece of trivia that I have never forgotten from
Dr. Matrix, learned over 50 years ago, was the little-known fact that
if you took the last 3 numbers of the series 113355 and divided it by
the first 3, you get pi accurate to 5 places, good enough for most
calculations. How fun is that? Of course, memorizing 3.14159 isn't all
that hard, but not nearly as amusing.

R.I.P Martin.

\Paul A

From: Terje Mathisen "terje.mathisen at on 27 May 2010 01:41
Quadibloc wrote:
> On May 26, 6:55 pm, Anthony Ayiomamitis<anth...(a)perseus.gr> wrote:
>
>> This is indeed very sad news! The first thing I would read with each
>> new issue was his column.
>
> And this was true for me as well, as for many others.

Ditto.

I tried to get hold of _all_ of his Mathematical Games books, I have
somewhere between 6 and 10 I guess. :-)

Reading every SA exposed me to all sorts of interesting stuff that I
otherwise probably wouldn't have heard about.

I very clearly remember that original article about RSA and public key
crypto, it gave me an epiphany. :-)

Terje

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
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