Every fall provides a special excuse for all thinking people to celebrate recreational math, magic and rationality, some of the things that were dear to America’s greatest man of letters and numbers, former Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner (1914 — 2010), via Celebration of Mind events. While Gardner was without doubt the best friend mathematics ever had–and it’s said he that his column reached a million readers a month at his peak–his career also saw him rub shoulders with Salvador Dali, the Amazing Randi, David Blaine, Teller (from the duo Penn & Teller), and two writers he influenced: Isaac Asimov and Vladimir Nabokov. I had the good fortune to get to know him for the last decade of his life, and he was a paragon of modesty, while remaining an intellectual powerhouse well into his nineties.