Stories by Martin Gardner

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How Keats's famous line applies to math and science

The author of Scientific American's column "Mathematical Games" from 1956 to 1981 recounts 25 years of amusing puzzles and serious discoveries

Casting a net on a checkerboard and other puzzles of the forest

The topology of knots, plus the results of Douglas Hofstadter's Luring Lottery

Tasks you cannot help finishing no matter how hard you try to block finishing them

The Laffer curve and other laughs in current economics

Euclid's parallel postulate and its modern offspring

The abstract parabola fits the concrete world

The inspired geometrical symmetries of Scott Kim

How Lavinia finds a room on University A venue, and other geometric problems

Gauss's congruence theory was mod as early as 1801

Patterns in primes are a clue to the strong law of small numbers

Taxicab geometry offers a free ride to a non-Euclidean locale

From counting votes to making votes count: the mathematics of elections

Dr. Matrix, like Mr. Holmes, comes to an untimely and mysterious end

On the fine art of putting players, pills and points into their proper pigeonholes

The pleasures of doing Science and technology in the planiverse

The capture of the monster: a mathematical group with a ridiculous number of elements

What unifies dinner guests, strolling schoolgirls and handcuffed prisoners?

Fun with eggs: uncooked, cooked and mathematical

Graphs that can help cannibals, missionaries, wolves, goats and cabbages get there from here

The coloring of unusual maps leads into uncharted territory