WHERE literacy meets numeracy, enthusiasm meets scepticism and philosophy meets fun, there you find Martin Gardner. He earned his crust by writing, but his abiding interest was in maths, and his gift, or rather one of them, was to explain mathematical concepts in ways that made sense to non-mathematicians. Many of them not only understood what he wrote but also became infected with his love of maths, of its beauty and of its capacity to give satisfaction, if not delight, when its riddles were solved and its paradoxes explained. For 25 years he provided both the puzzlement and the demystification in a column in Scientific American.

Mr Gardner did not come to this task from MIT or Caltech. Indeed, he had no formal maths training after high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But he did come from a job in journalism, to be precise, from a post at Humpty Dumpty's Magazine for Little Children, where among other tasks he helped with the designs, including all the cutouts. Cutouts also came his way when a conjuror introduced him to the hexaflexagon, a piece of paper folded into an almost flat six-sided shape that could be manipulated to reveal a series of different interiors one after another. This inspired him to write the article that launched his column, “Mathematical Games”, and with it a pastime now known as recreational maths.

Since this is a more benign, though almost equally addictive, version of its close relation, recreational drugs, it soon had a large following. Many were no doubt obsessive male teenagers and their fathers, epitomised perhaps by the followers of GeekDad, a blog that celebrates Geek Pride Day, nerdcore music and geek-chic fashion, as well as Mr Gardner. Some may have been sudoku, tredoku or futoshiki freaks, who buy daily newspapers, extract the puzzle pages and throw away the rest.

Others, however, were quite respectable. It is notable that Mr Gardner was one of the few popularisers of difficult subjects who earned the respect of serious thinkers, W.H. Auden, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Jay Gould and Douglas Hofstadter among them. Some, such as Roger Penrose (an Oxford mathematical physicist) and John Conway (a Princeton mathematician), owe some of their own celebrity to his writings about their work. No wonder it is sometimes said that Mr Gardner made mathematicians out of children and children out of mathematicians.

Maths, however, was far from being Mr Gardner's only interest, even though it inevitably played a part in his most popular book, “The Annotated Alice”. This went through Lewis Carroll's two Alice books, explaining the umpteen puns, jokes and allusions. He did the same for other works, including Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Chesterton's “The Innocence of Father Brown”, Joyce's “Ulysses”, Moore's “The Night Before Christmas” and Baum's “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”.

This was micro stuff, but Mr Gardner did the big picture too. He could defend realism in the face of quantum physics, tackle infinity and nothing, venture into the realms beyond cultural relativism, test proofs of God and wonder whether Isaiah Berlin was a hedgehog or a fox. He wrote with lucidity about the works of computer scientists, philosophers and playwrights, always giving credit where it was due.

Logic conquers (almost) all

Yet he was far more than a synthesiser. Indeed, all his non-fiction—he also wrote novels, short stories and poetry—was rigorously analytical. And though he was shy, usually shunning his fans' two-yearly “Gatherings for Gardner”, he was not afraid to speak his mind. Any beliefs he thought pseudoscientific, such as homeopathy, Scientology, creationism, anthroposophy, spoon-bending, astrology and flying saucers, he would dismiss with cool efficiency. Other ideas, such as Ronald Reagan's beloved Laffer curve, were derided in spoof articles: Mr Gardner had a sense of humour, and used it to effect. But he was not malicious. Though he enjoyed hoaxes, he would sometimes turn them on himself, once writing, under a pseudonym, a withering review of one of his own works in the New York Review of Books.

Did he spread himself too thin? It is hard not to think that anyone who writes more books (70-plus) than many people have read, as well as numberless articles and essays, must be at the controls of a sausage machine, yet the sausages were usually good. The harder question is where it all came from, to which the only answer is himself—and reading.

Studying philosophy at the University of Chicago, and reading voraciously from Plato to Kant to H.G. Wells, he abandoned the Christian fundamentalism of his teenage years and acquired an enduring respect for rationalism and science. Along the way, he also came to love magic—not spells and sorcery, but the tricks and illusions of puzzlers and prestidigitators.

Perhaps this helps explain the belief in God that he came to in later life. His declaration of this belief caused, he admitted, profound shock to those who knew him only as a sceptic. But there was too much playfulness in Mr Gardner to make him yield entirely to reason. His faith, he said, was based on an “emotional turning of the will”, unsupported by logic or science. It was his way, perhaps, of recognising that mind and man are not synonyms.