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  • Martin Gardner, 1914–2010
  • William Harmon (bio)

When, in 1993, Martin Gardner and I first met face to face, we had already been corresponding for several years, and I had been reading his columns, books, annotated editions, and anthologies for several years before that.

The first personal link between us was provided by George Starbuck. Our times at the University of Chicago overlapped during the 1950s, but we were not well acquainted. I learned later that George and I were winners of the John Billings Fiske Award for poetry, and also that we shared a back-ground in mathematics as well as in literature. Chicago admitted me as a fifteen-year-old high school junior because of my promise in math. After some placement tests an advisor told me that math would be no trouble but that my reading was so morbidly slow and sloppy that I would have to take a remedial course. I passed that eventually but was finding math no challenge [End Page 134] at all. It was boring, and at some point I became an English major. I know that George was much more accomplished in math than I would ever be, but I don’t remember what led him to branch out into literature.

By the 1970s George was at Boston University and I was at Chapel Hill, and we were both publishing books of poetry. He invited me to come to Boston for readings from time to time, and I invited him to Chapel Hill. We revived our shared Chicago memories and both had stories to tell about a colorful Miltonist named Ernest D. Sirluck. Just after George’s death in 1996, Sirluck published First Generation: An Autobiography, in which George is singled out as one of the best students. When I read that book some years later, I sent copies of the relevant pages to George’s widow, the poet Kathryn Starbuck, and I also wrote to Sirluck to renew our acquaintance. He still had good things to say about George and how he had hoped that George would use his talents in scholarship rather than poetry. He did not remember me.

George and I would also talk about Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. The column would often end with a set of questions or puzzles, and George’s name turned up more than once in the tally of those submitting correct responses. I could never do that. Once in a while, with world enough and time, I could work out a solution to a chess problem; but the math and logic were too much for me (or else too little: some things were really simple if you only thought about it). In early 1979 when I was visiting Boston for a reading, George and I talked about the latest set of questions, some of which were not strictly mathematical or games. One item asked: “Is scraunched at ten letters the longest written monosyllable in English?”

I told George that I had been satisfied to think that some lightweight like traipsed was a contender, but I could never think of ten letters. George impressed me by saying that he had written to Martin to say he had gotten “all schnappsed up” trying to think of something, but failed. There things rested until I took a taxi to Logan Airport and happened to notice a chrome fixture on a side panel of the vehicle: Brougham. I asked the driver how that word was pronounced, and he told me: something like “broom” or “brome.” “Then it is one syllable?” The driver said he thought so. I reflected. “Then,” I said, “would you agree that being conveyed in a brougham is being broughammed?” He agreed. “And that in keeping with the spelling rules you would double the final consonant?” The driver agreed with every proposition.

When I got home I wrote to George that I thought about the challenge while being broughammed to the airport but still couldn’t think of anything. Well George sent that to Martin, Martin wrote to me for confirmation, and in the April 1979 Scientific American I was given credit for the discovery of an eleven-letter...

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