In 1957, Gardner started a math games column in Scientific American, which continued for a quarter of a century until 1981. It was this column that established Gardner in the field of fun math.
In the eyes of the average person, math is often inscrutable and boring. But in Gardner's writing, an abstract math problem becomes fun. For example, in the May 1961 issue of Scientific American, Gardner gave a strange figure (see below): by dividing a triangle into four specific pieces and then reassembling them, the new triangle appears to have the same shape as the original.
There was absolutely no tampering with the splicing process, yet the second triangle looks surprisingly like it's missing a square of area!
Of course, this is just an optical illusion. See the entry Missing Squares for more details. One hundred and forty years ago, there was a childlike math teacher in Oxford, England, Lewis Carroll, a man of few words, who didn't seem too enthusiastic about teaching, yet he was very fond of children. That summer he was on an outing with the three Lidell sisters, the youngest of whom was Alice, daughter of the head of his college, and on the cruise ship he told a story about a rabbit, which was later the origin of the famous fairy tale Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This was the origin of the later famous fairy tale Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. About 100 years later, in 1960, another researcher in mathematics added detailed annotations to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which became Gardner's Annotated Alice.
Many scholars have studied both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice's Adventures in the Mirror in the more than 100 years since the publication of these two amazing works: Carroll's line of work is math, and both works contain many numbers and word games.
Gardner first read the work when he was eleven or twelve, yet was not impressed. By the time he got to the University of Chicago, when Gardner picked up the book again, he was suddenly mesmerized by the plot. This was the beginning of his study of Carroll's work and Carroll himself. At first, he thought that someone would write an annotated version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (many masterpieces of foreign literature-such as The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, etc.-have annotated versions, which not only analyze the plot, but also give some background on the writing to the avid reader). He often suggested that publishers get philosopher Bertrand Russell to write an annotated version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (the image of the hatter in the original illustrations is said to have come from Russell), yet Russell replied that he had no intention of writing such a book. So Gardner intended to write an annotated copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland himself.
In 1960, Gardner finally found a publisher willing to publish the book. In the book, called The Annotated Alice, Gardner, with the enthusiasm of a fan of Carroll's work, gives a rather brilliant annotation: it includes an introduction to the author's background, explanations of the book's history, legends, and poems, scholarly commentaries, and debates on some of the episodes, and even unearths some of the text's hidden words (which Carroll liked to use). This method, similar to the Chinese "hidden-title poem")
What Gardner probably didn't realize when he published the book was that it would make him the world's best-known expert on Carroll. Since then, Gardner has also published "The Universe in a Handkerchief," which describes some of Carroll's mathematical games. In addition to Carroll's work, Gardner has also authored The Annotated Wizard of Oz. He even wrote a sequel to The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy and others traveled to modern-day New York in a novel called Visitors from Oz!