ConwayLife.com

Martin Gardner died on Saturday, aged 95. He originally brought the Game of Life to the wider world in 1970, in his regular Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/october1970.html

My father showed me an article about Life in the London Sunday Times shortly afterwards. It wasn't his kind f thing, but he figured I might be interested in it. I sat for hours at the dining room table, shuffling coins around on a large sheet of paper I had ruled into squares. I was 13.

Cheers, Paul

I am far too young to have read anything from Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American, but I do have a few of his books of mathematical puzzles. It's too bad that a famous figure in Life history and a proponent of mathematics and science has died.

I already knew about his column from general interest, but especially for the articles on flexagons (which apparently started his career), and on Escher's drawings. The Dr. Matrix articles were less interesting to me, but my reaction to Life (apart from the little green trisexual microbes and the effort to promote ecology) was "here's an article for Zeitschrift für Kristallographie," if it would be possible to figure out the still lifes. Which came in due course.

There's no denying his tremendous impact on popular, and particularly mathematical, culture.

There's no denying his tremendous impact on popular, and particularly mathematical, culture.

Yes, he is irreplaceable. Nevertheless, many people have been influenced by him, and some (such as Ian Stewart) have tried to continue his legacy.