Editing Martin Gardner (section)

==Pen names==
Gardner often used pen names. In 1952, while working for the children's magazine ''[[Humpty Dumpty (magazine)|Humpty Dumpty]]'', he contributed stories written by "Humpty Dumpty Jnr". For several years starting in 1953 he was a managing editor of ''Polly Pigtails'', a magazine for young girls, and also wrote under that name. His ''Annotated Casey at the Bat'' (1967) included a parody of the poem, attributed to "Nitram Rendrag" (his name spelled backwards). Using the pen name "Uriah Fuller", he wrote two books attacking the alleged psychic [[Uri Geller]]. In later years, Gardner often wrote parodies of his favorite poems under the name "Armand T. Ringer", an [[anagram]] of his name.<ref name=alters>[http://martin-gardner.org/Top10MGAE.html Top 10 Martin Gardner Alter Egos] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170317115739/http://martin-gardner.org/Top10MGAE.html |date=2017-03-17 }} at martin-gardner.org</ref> In 1983 one George Groth panned Gardner's book ''The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener'' in the ''[[New York Review of Books]]''. Only in the last line of the review was it revealed that George Groth was Martin Gardner himself.<ref name=Night_is_Large>"Gardner's Whys" in ''The Night is Large'', chapter 40, pp. 481–87.</ref>

In his January 1960 "Mathematical Games" column, Gardner introduced the fictitious "[[Dr. Matrix]]" and wrote about him often over the next two decades. Dr. Matrix was not exactly a pen name, although Gardner did pretend that everything in these columns came from the fertile mind of the good doctor. Then in 1979 Dr. Matrix himself published an article in the quite respectable ''[[Two-Year College Mathematics Journal]]''.<ref>Matrix, Irving Joshua (1979). ''Martin Gardner: Defending the Honor of the Human Mind'', The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Sep., 1979), pp. 227–232.</ref> It was called ''Martin Gardner: Defending the Honor of the Human Mind'' and contained a biography of Gardner and a history of his "Mathematical Games" column. It would be a further decade before Martin published an article in such a mathematics journal under his own name.<ref name=alters/>