The Aperiodical 

You're reading: A Gardner’s Dozen in TikZ

3. Graeco-Latin square

By Peter Rowlett. Posted April 10, 2024

With the emphasis on occasionally, I’m occasionally working to (sort of) recreate Martin Gardner’s cover images from Scientific American, the so-called Gardner’s Dozen.

This time I’m looking at the cover image from the November 1959 issue. The column is ‘How three modern mathematicians disproved a celebrated conjecture of Leonhard Euler’, about the so-called Euler’s Spoilers, the story of three mathematicians – Parker, Bose and Shrikhande – who had disproved a conjecture of Euler’s about Latin squares. The column was reprinted as chapter 14 in his New Mathematical Diversions from Scientific American.



2. Four bugs

By Peter Rowlett. Posted October 18, 2023

Reminder: I’m occasionally working to (sort of) recreate Martin Gardner’s cover images from Scientific American, the so-called Gardner’s Dozen.

This time I’m looking at the cover image from the July 1965 issue, accompanying the column on ‘op art’ (which became chapter 24 in Martin Gardner’s Sixth Book of Mathematical Diversions from Scientific American).



1. Patterns

By Peter Rowlett. Posted August 14, 2023

Martin Gardner’s long-running column in Scientific American made it onto the front cover of the magazine twelve times. Gathering 4 Gardner refers to these cover stories as “A Gardner’s Dozen“, while pointing out that these aren’t his ‘greatest hits’ and the magazine artists didn’t necessarily reproduce the graphics as he would have liked them.

Nevertheless, I thought it would be a fun challenge to try to reproduce these in TikZ, a drawing package for LaTeX. I like TikZ, and appreciate a chance to practice my skills. Readers of the future will be able to judge how many of the dozen I produced, and how regularly I did these.

The first I chose is the cover from November 1969. Last summer I had the pleasure of visiting Scarthin Books in Cromford, Derbyshire while walking along the Derwent with my son. Inside I found a small pile of old copies of Scientific American and thought it would be nice to own a copy with an original Martin Gardner article. Naturally, I chose the issue they had where his article provided the cover image.