Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner died yesterday at the age of 96. For those who don’t know him, Gardner was a great science popularizer, famous for his column on recreational mathematics published in Scientific American.

His main contribution was his lifelong fight against pseudoscientific fraud. James Randi pays him a heartfelt tribute on his blog. He is without doubt a great loss for science outreach and for the skeptical movement.

I leave you with a video, an episode of “The Nature of Things” (the TV show that inspired the name of this blog), where David Suzuki shows us Gardner’s world, and his importance for the popularization of science, mathematics and rational thinking: