Gardner, Martin (1924-)

Journalist and writer, born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on October 21, 1914. Gardner graduated from the University of Chicago (B.A., 1936). His first job was as a reporter for the Tulsa Tribune. In the 1950s he moved to New York and in 1957 became associated with Scientific American, for which he has written a column on mathematical games for many years.

In 1952 Gardner wrote what has become the most famous and enduring of his many books, In the Name of Science (reprinted in 1957 as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science), a skeptical book dealing with numerous scientific deadends, hoaxes, and religious groups that made scientific claims to support their beliefs. The volume has become a classic of debunking literature relative to the occult.

Gardner continued to turn out books, primarily on mathematics, over the years. Periodically he gathered his columns into what has turned into a series of books on mathematical games. In the 1980s he returned to the debunking role and turned out three new volumes: Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus (1981), The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher (1988), and How Not to Test a Psychic: Ten Years of Remarkable Experiments with Renowned Psychic Pavel Stepanek (1989). In this debunking role he has identified with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, of which he was an original member.

Sources:

Gardner, Martin. How Not to Test a Psychic: Ten Years of Remarkable Experiments with Renowned Psychic Pavel Stepanek. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989.

——. In the Name of Science. New York: George Putnam's Sons, 1952. Reprinted as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. New York: Dover Publications, 1957.

——. New Age Notes of a Fringe Watcher. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1988.

——. Science, God, Bad, and Bogus. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1981.