Alongside his legion accomplishments in our industry, Martin Gardner is (of course) renown for his work with recreational mathematics. Puzzles, brain teasers and math problems have been the subject of over 70 collections he’s authored.
But before all that, as the New York Times chronicled yesterday, he had a regular gig as the assistant to an egg man.
For today’s mathematical puzzle, assume that in the year 1956 there was a children’s magazine in New York named after a giant egg, Humpty Dumpty, who purportedly served as its chief editor. Mr. Dumpty was assisted by a human editor named Martin Gardner, who prepared “activity features” and wrote a monthly short story about the adventures of the child egg, Humpty Dumpty Jr. Another duty of Mr. Gardner’s was to write a monthly poem of moral advice from Humpty Sr. to Humpty Jr.
Mr. Gardner’s 95th birthday is today. We wish him (and Humpty Jr.) the best.