Over the years, Martin Gardner has recounted his visits and interviews with the amazing Dr. Irving Joshua Matrix, a man considered by many to be the greatest numerologist of all time. The late Dr. Matrix was the leading authority on number and language coincidences, especially the type that Jung referred to as "synchronicity." For example, it was Dr. Matrix who was the first to reveal that HAL, the crazed computer in the film 2001, was obtained by shifting each letter of IBM back by one. Dr. Matrix also detailed the astonishing number and letter coincidences related to the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy.

In this collection of his columns from Scientific American, Martin Gardner traces th eentertaining escapades of Dr. Matrix, from their first meeting in New York City in 1959, to the numerologist's violent death in the Soviet Union in 1980.

"Numbers, you know, have a mysterious life of their own," Dr. Matrix once told Gardner. As you delve into the Doctor's mysterious world, you will learn to master some significant combinatorial mathematics and number theory. Martin Gardner has included many of Dr. Matrix's remarkable puzzles, all of which are clearly answered in the back of the book, together with helpful explanations and references by Gardner to enlighten the uninitiated.

Copyright © 1996-2009 Alexander Bogomolny

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