For today’s magic show: A century ago, Martin Gardner was born in Oklahoma. He philosophized for his diploma. He wrote on Hex and Tic-Tac-Toe. The Icosian game and polyomino. Flexagons from paper trim, Samuel Loyd, the game of Nim. Digital roots and Soma stairs, mazes, logic, magic squares. Squaring squares, the golden Phi. Solved the spider and the fly. Packing circles (with corrections), ellipses, pi, and conic sections.

Group theory braids and primal gaps, Latin squares, the four-color maps. Hypercubes and Turing machines, curves of constant width, eight queens. The Klein bottle when cut in halfs, helices and Graceful Graphs. The Arecibo message, divisibility tests. The Ulam spiral, parity checks. Bracing buildings that won’t tilt, trisections, Mrs. Perkins’s Quilt. Pascal’s triangle, ternary scoring, bouncing balls for water pouring. Constrained geometry construction, e and patterns of induction. The abacus and random walks, cyclic numbers, sliding blocks. Pythagorean theorem, gears, art of M. C. Escher, spheres. Dominoes and overhang jutting, infinite series, fair cake cutting. Aleph-Null and Aleph-One. For Game of Life, a glider gun. Paterson’s worms and knotted torus, paper folding, Nine Men’s Morris. A problem solved by Andrew Wiles. Pigeonholes and Penrose tiles. Peg solitaire, a loop of string, folded dragon curves, I Ching. Rep-tiles and Borromean rings. The pentagons of Marjorie Rice, shuffling, “The Kiss Precise,” tetrahedra, cycloids, dice. Diophantine analyses, geometric fallacies. Dice nontransitivity, special relativity. The list meanders on for days, but that’s enough to give him praise.

Originally published at the Wolfram Blog.