Hijinks with Martin Gardner

The NYTBR reviewer of Martin Gardner’s Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner recounts some of Gardner’s many pranks.

“Once, a houseguest left behind a single glove at the home of Gardners friend Bob Murray. Murray went to several local department stores until he found a pair of gloves that matched the glove the woman had left behind. Then he mailed her a glove of the same handedness she already had. He never heard from that houseguest again.”

“An April Fools hoax column [in Scientific American ] taught bogus chess strategies and offered humbug evidence that Leonardo da Vinci had invented the flush toilet.

The whimsy colors Garnder’s fiction:

In his story “The No-Sided Professor,” “a mathematician . . . creates an object stranger than the one-sided Mbius strip: a strip with no sides at all; when the fold is completed, the paper simply vanishes. The professor eventually folds himself into a similar configuration and likewise disappears, leaving his clothes behind (he reappears nude out of the ceiling of a strip club, one of Gardners favorite settings).”

In another story, he wrote about the “hexahexaflexagon, a topological marvel that could be folded to show a variety of different faces. Suddenly, ‘all over New York City readers of the magazine, especially those in advertising offices, were making and flexing flexagons.’”