Martin Gardner 
Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?
Discourses on Reflexology,
Numerology, Urine Therapy, and
Other Dubious Subjects.
W. W. Norton, 336 pages; $26.95

Ifind it difficult to speak temperately about Martin Gardner because I owe him so much. As a child in England, my keenest intellectual pleasure was reading Gardner’s monthly “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American. Along with a handful of books like Kasner and Newman’s Mathematics and the Imagination and George Gamow’s One Two Three Infinity, Gardner’s columns opened for me the doors of mathematics, leading me forward to a lifetime of pleasure and instruction from that most elegant and challenging of all disciplines. Later I read Gardner’s book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, which, along with its British equivalent, Patrick Moore’s Can You Speak Venusian?, inoculated me forever against any temptation to waste my time and money believing in astrology, homeopathy, spoon-bending, mind-reading, UFOs, acupuncture, or any other kind of pseudoscientific flapdoodle.

I am, of course, not alone in my debt to this wonderful man. Nobody alive has done more than Gardner to spread the understanding and appreciation of mathematics, and to dispel superstition. Nobody has worked harder or more steadily to defend and enlarge this little firelit clearing we hold in the dark chittering forest of unreason. If Gardner were British, he would long since have been the recipient of one of our national honors—a Commander of the British Empire, perhaps, or even, like