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A lot of people first learned about Lisp from him. In fact, I bet more people learned about Lisp from him than anyone else.
by pg 16y ago
A lot of people first learned about Lisp from him. In fact, I bet more people learned about Lisp from him than anyone else.
- jgg 16y agoWhen you think about a lot of what's considered to be "cool" math, logic or CS stuff, there's a good chance that Martin Gardner helped introduce it to people. He's up there with Douglas Hofstadter on my list of people who taught me that those things could be interesting (and even beautiful), even if most schools taught them to me as a disconnected set of silly rules to memorize for a multiple-choice test.
- tokenadult 16y agoA lot of people first learned about Lisp from [Martin Gardner]. In fact, I bet more people learned about Lisp from him than anyone else. Your comment prompted me to do a Google search on Gardner and Lisp. Are you sure you don't mean Douglas Hofstadter, Gardner's successor as Scientific American columnist? http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/reviews/hofstadter-themas.html http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/reviews/hofstadter-the... No doubt about it, Gardner is credited by a lot of mathematicians in roughly my generation as their inspiration for studying mathematics.
- pg 16y agoHmm, I know I'm thinking about the famous Scientific American column. I thought it was before Hoftstadter took over, but it's hard to be certain.