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Comment by laderach | Hacker News Reader

My son is now 4 years old, he has been showing a great deal of interest in playing with numbers and puzzles, so I have been thinking quite a bit about this lately.

The other day I ran across an issue of Scientific American from the late 70s (http://flowcytometry.sysbio.med.harvard.edu/files/flowcytome...) and I was super impressed by the quality and educational value of the content. Much superior to its current version. They have a ton of super interesting "mini" papers about all sorts of topics. In that issue alone I learned about:

- The metabolism of alcohol

- The meteorology of Jupiter

- Simpson's paradox

Take a look at it. I think you might be impressed too.

The other site I have fallen in love with recently is Fermat's Library (https://fermatslibrary.com). They essentially publish an annotated paper every week (usually physics, cs, math). Reading their papers is now a part of my weekly routine.

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I grew up in an inner city Detroit neighborhood. The junior high school that I attended was pretty rough so, to avoid the gangs that formed after school, I quickly ran over to the near by public library and stayed there until it was safe to walk home around dinner time.

A friend showed me a magazine at the library; it was Scientific American and it completely hooked me. This was 1963 and SA was then a great magazine. I read every current issue and then read the bound volumes of past issues. My favorite monthly columns were Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games and the Amateur Scientist. I read every one of those two columns ever published.

The schools I attended were not very good, but I learned a lot of math and science during those years at the library. I went on to score very high in math and science, got into great colleges and ended up with a very successful career.

Martin Gardner was amazing. I was privileged to meet him shortly before he left us, and he was still spry, mentally alert, and interested in nearly everything. Much of his work has dated badly, some equally, much of it is timeless, and just as engaging now as it was then.

Martin was a huge influence on my life, and I treasure the afternoon I spent with him in person, and the thousands of hours I spent with him via his writings.

You might like this https://www.amazon.com/dp/0883855453/

Thank you for sharing your story! I am going to google Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games later this afternoon!

A book that is based on many of Martin's articles is: "Symmetry, Shape & Space".

I glanced through the Scientific American link you pasted and it looks awesome.

It’s not just the content but the ads and the copywriting is just incredible. In this age of 140 chars You don’t see such long form copy anymore...

Scientific American looks awesome. Love the ads too,

p21: Atari's new remote pre-programmed computer ping-pong game can be used with any size TV set, black and white or color.

p14: > HP's 9825A: a powerful new desk-top computing system. Through its novel architecture and speed, the 9825A runs programs, accepts keyboard operations, and controls instruments-with apparent simultaneity. ... > The 9825's storage capacity includes 8K bytes of internal read! write memory, expandable to 32K bytes; in addition, each bidirectional tape cartridge can store 250K bytes. Its built-in tape cartridge drive can access data in an average of six seconds, and transfer data at 2750 bytes per second. At these speeds, and with memory load and recall capabilities not previously found in desk-top systems, it becomes entirely practical to interrupt a long program, transfer it to tape, run a short program, then reload and continue the first one.

Check out Knuth's book "Surreal Numbers: How two ex-students turned on to pure mathematics and found total happiness". It's a book about discovering new mathematics, in this case Conway's Surreal Numbers.

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/sn.html

The style of writing may well be very attractive, but it's important to remember that you're reading scientific articles written about forty years ago, and above that, in fields that are both advancing very quickly.

I don't have the opportunity to read the linked magazine right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if much of the research cited in it has been disproven.

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