Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914 – May 22, 2010)[1] was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, pseudoscience, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, and published over 70 books.[2].
A lot of people first learned about Lisp from [Martin Gardner]. In fact, I bet more people learned about Lisp from him than anyone else.
Your comment prompted me to do a Google search on Gardner and Lisp. Are you sure you don't mean Douglas Hofstadter, Gardner's successor as Scientific American columnist?
When you think about a lot of what's considered to be "cool" math, logic or CS stuff, there's a good chance that Martin Gardner helped introduce it to people. He's up there with Douglas Hofstadter on my list of people who taught me that those things could be interesting (and even beautiful), even if most schools taught them to me as a disconnected set of silly rules to memorize for a multiple-choice test.
Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914 – May 22, 2010)[1] was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, pseudoscience, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, and published over 70 books.[2].
From wikipedia