Jump to ratings and reviews. Want to Read. Buy on Amazon. Rate this book. Mathematical Games. Martin Gardner. Now, this material has been brought together on one, searchable CD.
A profile and interview with martin Gardner is included in this collection. It is not obvious, however, whether there is a starting configuration that will lead the number of occupied squares to increase without bound.
Originally, Conway and Gardner thought that this was impossible, but after the article was published, a reader and mathematician called Bill Gosper discovered the glider gun: a starting arrangement in Life that fires a glider every 30 generations.
As each of these gliders will go on to live forever, this starting configuration results in the number of live cells perpetually increasing! This discovery allowed Conway to prove that any Turing machine can be built within Life: starting arrangements exist that can calculate the digits of pi, solve equations, or do any other calculation a computer is capable of although very slowly!
Another concept that made it into Mathematical Games shortly after its discovery was public key cryptography. Here, messages are encoded using two publicly shared numbers, or keys. These numbers and the method used to encrypt messages can be publicly shared as knowing this information does not reveal how to decrypt the message. Rather, decryption of the message requires knowing the prime factors of one of the keys. If this key is the product of two very large prime numbers, then this is a very difficult task.
Gardner had no education in maths beyond high school, and at times had difficulty understanding the material he was writing about. He believed, however, that this was a strength and not a weakness: his struggle to understand led him to write in a way that other non-mathematicians could follow. This goes a long way to explaining the popularity of his column. MAA Book? Inquiry Based Learning? Home Page? Electronic Media? Apparel or Gift: false.
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