Today is the 110th birthday of Martin Gardner (1914–2010)! Every year around this date, various groups hold “Celebration of Mind” festivals. You can find some examples on the Gathering 4 Gardner site, although I see at the moment it’s a little sparse and 404’ish.

This 110th birthday seems like a good excuse to mention that in the past couple of months I’ve helped John Miller add some new data to his online index of all Martin Gardner’s Scientific American columns. John has been maintaining this list since 1975, and has kept it online since 1999 (see his historical notes here). This year, for the first time, each row of the table contains a link to JSTOR’s entry for the original Scientific American column.

• If you have a JSTOR account (e.g. through your employer or university), you can download a PDF of the Scientific American column directly from its JSTOR page. Otherwise, you just get a preview of the first page of the column.

• JSTOR seems to have a “free plan” where you can create an account and get access to three articles every two weeks — 78 articles a year. Instructions for creating a free account directly through JSTOR are here.

• If you have a Wikipedia username and use it occasionally, then you almost certainly have unlimited free access to JSTOR via the Wikipedia Library. (Specifically, you qualify if you’ve made 10+ edits in the last 30 days, and 500+ edits over 6+ months as a registered user.) And if you don’t occasionally edit Wikipedia — well, why not start? Not only will you contribute to the collective knowledge of humanity, you’ll also get free JSTOR access!

In the future I hope to see John’s list expanded also with links to each column as it appeared when eventually collected in book form. (Perhaps via links to the Internet Archive, assuming they regain stability and don’t just go dark forever after the ongoing cyberattacks, publisher lawsuits, etc. This year has certainly made me much more amenable to gwern’s affinity for “rehosting” versus hyperlinking, although as of this writing I remain too lazy to actually start doing it.)

This being Gardner’s 110th birthday, I wonder whether it would be possible to find a configuration in Stephen Wolfram’s Rule 110 cellular automaton that, when evolved downward, produces output resembling “MG” or a portrait of Gardner or some such. One might try applying the techniques described in “Conway’s Gradient of Life” (Kartik Chandra, May 2020), although I suspect that the two problems are significantly different: Chandra’s problem was to make a configuration that evolved over time to produce a final “snapshot” with a certain density, whereas what I’m picturing involves a configuration whose density itself evolves over time in a certain way.

However, having other things to do today, I’ve done nothing more on that subject than the idle thought recorded above. If you have ideas (or even better, solutions), email me and I’ll happily credit you here!

For various Gardner-related topics and souvenirs of Octobers past, check out the #celebration-of-mind tag on this blog.