The man who would one day be called "the best friend mathematics ever had," and of whom it would be said that he turned countless innocent youths into mathematics teachers and thousands of mathematics teachers into innocent youths, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 21 October 1914.
Martin Gardner was the son of a teacher steeped in the Montessori method and in a fervent Methodist faith, and of a geologist with a doctorate who had turned independent oil prospector; the family settled in Kentucky (United States). By his own admission, Gardner was a bright child but one insufficiently stimulated intellectually at school.
The formative years
-----------------------
He might have come to despise intellectual pursuits had it not been for the encouragement of his physics teacher, a certain Mr. E. Hurst. Hurst prepared him intellectually and encouraged him to pursue a scientific career. The young Gardner came to set his sights on joining the laboratory of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Andrews Millikan at the California Institute of Technology. Yet at the time, no one could enter Caltech without first having devoted at least two years to the study of science.
To satisfy this admission requirement, Gardner enrolled at the University of Chicago, where the young and controversial president Robert Maynard Hutchins — a tireless champion of Socratic dialogue and of the "Great Books" curriculum (classics of philosophy, science, economics and literature) — had implemented a sweeping reform of both the pedagogical approach and the workings of the undergraduate education system. Whatever their field of study, undergraduates were required to take an introductory course in physics, biology, social science and the humanities. After that, they were free to attend as many courses as they wished, whether enrolled or auditing, in any field of knowledge.
