The Gathering 4 Gardner is a gathering held
every two years in honor of Martin Gardner, a journalist who
wrote a column, "Mathematical Games", for Scientific American
for twenty-five years. Even though he has retired, his books and
other writings haven't stopped coming. Every two years, famous
mathematicians, puzzlers, and magicians gather together to
celebrate his work. The event has been going on since 1993, and
this is the 9th gathering. It is an invitation-only event, and I
was lucky enough to get invited, simply because I had provided
an elegant proof of a very small part of a puzzle that Martin
Gardner once mentioned in his column, and somehow got picked to
present the entire paper to 300 math gurus.
I was traveling with a math teacher from
Taipei, Dr. Sun, who had his own mathematics club, and also
helped train Taiwan contestants for various math competitions.
We arrived at the airport early Wednesday morning. Getting to
Atlanta would take a long time, requiring two airplane transfers
and enough passport hassles to last a lifetime. The slideshow I
was going to present seemed to require more and more work as I
updated it, and of course there was the oppressive jet lag. In
fact, our last airplane, from Chicago to Atlanta, got delayed,
and we barely made it before the metro shut down and we would
have to walk to our hotel at midnight without directions. But we
made it, and were able to get to the conference the next day.
After a quick breakfast at the local Corner
Bakery, Dr. Sun and I found the Ritz-Carlton where the
conference would take place and went straight to the
registration room. The hotel was clearly expensive and lavish,
with carpets and curtains and tablecloths everywhere. The
registration was pretty smooth, and afterwards we went straight
down to the actual conference room, which had about fifty
tables, eight seats each, and eight pens, glasses, and
chocolate-covered sticks at each table. There were two podiums
in the front, two projector screens on both sides of the room, a
big whiteboard in-between, and a tech-support guy called Solomon
sitting in the side, who helped switch the image sources on the
projector screens around.
It would be completely impossible to describe
the vastness of the topics that people presented. Most talks
were on mathematics, but there were talks on illusions, books,
mathematical toys, juggling, origami, and hacking (complete with
a few mildly disturbing on-stage presentations). Two talks,
which have taken place in every gathering, talk about the number
of the event, 9: the first about how wonderful 9 was, and the
second about how awful 9 was. Things quoted include the curious
occurence of two movies coming out, one called "Nine" and one
called "9" and completely unrelated. But perhaps I should write
more about the talk I knew the best, my own.
I was arranged to speak on the very first
day, Thursday, fifth in the afternoon session, at about 2:30 PM.
The speaker before me was talking about "The Ambiguous Corner
Cube and Friends": illusions involving cubes and depth
perception. As everybody was watching him, I stumbled on-stage
and started preparing my talk, getting the computer all plugged
in, preparing my note cards, book, and timer (the Gathering has
very strict time rules), silently reciting my first words of
introduction, staring at the hugeness of the crowd, floundering
as Solomon fitted the microphone to my shirt. After the host
thanked the previous speaker and indicated me, I took a deep
breath and started introducing myself. It was all basic things
like my name, age, grade, country, and gratitude to the
organizers. Jumping blindly into my presentation, I explained
the puzzle, making irrelevant circles with the laser pointer in
my hand, and watching my slideshow animations jump all over the
screen. Thankfully I had rehearsed enough to know how much time
was allotted for each part, or at least copy it down on the back
of my extremely small note card. Nevertheless I was very nervous
and ended up mumbling and repeating a lot. But I guess it turned
out well, since five different people found me afterwards and
said that my talk was very clear.
Talks were indeed the core of the event, and
the schedule was immeasurably packed, but there was more.
Firstly there were the dinners, and amazing magic performances.
Words can't explain the wondrousness. But I still remember
Lennart Green's "signature performance". Basically, he guessed
the card the volunteer picked with six layers of aluminum foil
and duct tape stuck across his eyes and entire head. No way.
Then, there was the sculpting event, where about ten sculptors
brought components of one of their planned sculptures for
everybody to help assemble. There was this wonderful net of
wooden planks and connectors, a twisty cube-filling "Hilbert
curve" of metal pipes, and balloon octahedrons. I didn't have
time to see all of them, but made some very nice octahedrons,
plus a chain from all the popped balloons made by either the
folks who mishandled the balloons or Gareth Conway and his
friend, who were busily blowing balloons just to pop. (Gareth
is, I don't know, six to ten years old, and here primarily to
accompany John Conway the mathie. Still, he can recite 150
digits of pi.)
Finally, at the end, the gift exchange bag
was distributed. The idea was simple: everybody who went had to
bring 300 nice things for everybody else. There were things like
wooden pliers, dice, mysterious boxes, puzzles, pamphlets, CDs,
and a highly out-of-place back scratching tool. There was also a
twenty-pound thousand-page book by Stephen Wolfram, plus a few
normal-size books. Those people who didn't want physical things
could put a paper into the exchange booklet, which was going to
be distributed afterwards. Luckily the paper on Triangles of
Absolute Differences became my submission by default, since the
other co-authors had more experience doing these things.
The gathering ended there, but thanks to Dr.
Sun's planning and contacts, we had more events: our next stop
was at Indianapolis to visit a Lilly Library and its collection
of puzzles, which was donated by the great puzzle-guru Jerry
Slocum. We learned about the box-making machines and various
sorting and storing mechanisms. Then we visited the Auxiliary
Research Facility, where about two million books were stored in
regulated temperature and humidity conditions in bookshelves
with a height of about 30 levels in all! They had to use a
forklift to get the books, but even then they had a retrieval
time of one day. Once you requested a book, they could find it
and have it sent to you in the same day. Of course they had the
data in a computer for search. Plus there were a few other
quirks, for example how the books requested get moved to the
front, so that the more frequently requested books become easier
to find. Anyway, this part lasted two days, during which we made
the best of our hosts' hospitality for lots of nice meals.
In the last part of our journey, we traveled
to Chicago to visit one of Dr. Sun's previous students, Jerry
Lo. They talked a lot about college life and learning and Dr.
Sun's retirement, and we were shown around the campus. For lunch
we visited the local Medici restaurant, where I got a huge
burger and milkshake, probably the most "American" of all the
meals. Plus, I got to finally run through the extensive shopping
list my friends had detailed for me: Nerds and Airheads and
Orbit gum and souvenir T-shirts and chocolate. It took all night
to get all that into the suitcase. But it was accomplished, and
after a night of sleep we were ready to return to Taiwan.
There ended my trip, but the puzzles in the
exchange bag kept me thinking about them for many more days. I
doubt I've gone even close to learning about one third of the
things in the bag. There are at least three CDs, none of which I
have touched yet, and a paper sculpting kit, and plenty more.
But even after I'm finished with that, I'll keep on finding and
learning about puzzles, because this area is so interesting. And
after that, there's always the G4G10!
