Alex's Adventures in Numberland - Alex Bellos [104]
Spidron and spidron ball.
One afternoon the delegates of the conference relocated to the home of Tom Rodgers in the Atlanta suburbs. Rodgers, a businessman in late middle age, organized the first G4G in 1993. An admirer of Gardner’s since childhood, Rodgers’ initial idea was to have an event where the famously shy Gardner could meet some of the many readers he had corresponded with. He decided to invite guests from three specific areas of Gardner’s interest – maths, magic and puzzles. The gathering was such a success that a second one was organized in 1996. Gardner showed up to the first two but since then has been too frail to attend. Rodgers lives in a bungalow designed in Japanese style, surrounded by a forest of bamboo, pine and fruit trees that were in blossom when I visited. In the garden several guests were forming teams to build geometrical sculptures out of wood and metal. Others were attempting to solve a bespoke puzzle hunt whose clues were stuck to the house’s outside walls.
Suddenly, the shriek of Princeton University maths professor John Horton Conway grabbed everyone’s attention. Conway had a messy beard, a full head of silvery hair and was wearing a T-shirt with an equation on it. He is one of the most outstanding mathematicians of the last 50 years. He asked for everyone to bring him ten pine cones each so that he could count their spirals. Cone-classifying is a recent hobby of his; he has counted about 5000 of them since he started a few years ago.
Inside the house I met Colin Wright, an Australian who lives in Port Sunlight on the Wirral. With his schoolboyish ginger hair and glasses, he looks just how you might expect a mathematician to look. Wright is a juggler, which ‘seemed like the obvious thing to do after I learned to ride a unicycle’, he said. He also helped develop a mathematical notation for juggling, which might not sound like much, but has electrified the international juggling community. It turns out that with a language, jugglers have been able to discover tricks that had eluded them for thousands of years. ‘Once you have a language to talk about a problem, it aids your thought process,’ said Wright, as he took out some bean balls to demonstrate a recently invented three-ball juggle. ‘Maths is not sums, calculations and formulae. It is pulling things apart to understand how things work.’
I asked him if there was something self-indulgent, pointless or even wasteful about the finest minds in mathematics spending their time working on inconsequential pastimes like juggling, counting pine cones or even puzzle-solving. ‘You need to let mathematicians do what they do,’ he replied. ‘You genuinely never know what is going to be useful.’ He quoted the example of Cambridge professor G.H. Hardy, who in 1940 famously (and proudly) declared that number theory had no practical applications; in fact, it is now the basis of many internet security programs. Mathematicians have, according to Wright, been ‘unreasonably successful’ in finding applications to apparently useless theorems, and often years after the theorems were first discovered.
One of the most charming aspects of the G4G is that all guests are asked to bring a gift – ‘something you would want to give to Martin’. In fact, you are asked to bring 300 of your gift, since each guest is given a goody bag at the end, containing one of everyone else’s gift. The year I visited the goody bag included puzzles, magic tricks, books, CDs, gadgets and piece of plastic that can mke a Coke can talk. One bag was for Martin Gardner, and I took it to him.
Gardner lives in Norman, Oklahoma. The day I arrived storms were moving across the state. After a few wrong turns off the interstate, I found his home, an Assisted Living Center next to a Texan fast-food