He also was a worthy successor to Martin Gardner in his Scientific American columns, and like Gardner, collected those columns into a series of books, The Tinke

He also was a worthy successor to Martin Gardner in his Scientific American columns, and like Gardner, collected those columns into a series of books, The Tinkertoy Computer, The Magic Machine, and The Armchair Universe. What made his columns a bit different from Gardner's is that writing in the 1980s and 1990s, he often presented the puzzles and what not as ideas for readers to program on their home computers.