MARTIN GARDNER  is a remarkable man. He is most familiar asthe author for many years of the Mathematical Games columnof the  Scientific American  magazine. Every month thousandsof readers of that magazine would turn eagerly to Gardner's col-umn to find what was new in the world of recreational mathe-matics. The articles were always written in an eminently read-able style, whether he was retailing the witty frivolities of Dr.Matrix, or giving an erudite exposition of some recent research.I was privileged to stay with Martin and Charlotte Gardner attheir former home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York on several-occasions. Many happy hours were spent pouring over some ofthe contents of Martin's den at the top of the house on EuclidAvenue. It was filled with puzzles, games, mechanical toys, sci-entific curiosities, and a host of other intriguing objects, exactlylike a wizard's den. Not inappropriately, Martin  is  a keen ama-teur magician, and so has lots of magic books and of course healso has a large collection of the  L.  Frank Baum books aboutthe Wizard of  Oz.  His other books were no less interesting.Where else could you take a book at random off the shelf anddiscover that it was an entire novel written without using theletter "en?Don't let all of this give you the impression that Martin him-self is in any way strange. In fact he is an intensely rationalman, who has no patience with cranks, tricksters, or charlatansof any description. He has written many articles exposing vari-ous deceptions, and has a fine book,  Fads and Fallacies irz the