Gathering for Gardner

The Gathering for Gardner (G4G) is a conference held in Atlanta every two years in honour of Martin Gardner. He used to write a column in the Scientific American about recreational mathematics, most of which have been expanded upon and reprinted in various books. He has also written many other books about puzzles, mathematics, magic tricks, and much more.

G4G Exchange Gifts

Up to about 300 people attend the Gathering for Gardner. There is an exchange gift system, whereby most attendees bring a small gift for everyone, and in return you get 299 different gifts from the other attendees. The gift can be a physical item, for example a puzzle or curiosity, or a written paper which can be supplied electronically. I started attending at G4G6 and here is a list of the exchange gifts that I did.

2004, G4G6	-	A CD-ROM containing twisty puzzle patents, and a copy of my puzzle site.
2006, G4G7	-	A paper about Rotational Puzzles on Graphs (39 KB).
2008, G4G8	-	An updated version of the G4G6 CD-ROM with twisty puzzle patents, and a copy of my puzzle site.
2010, G4G9	-	A paper containing some simple 3x3 tiling puzzles (158 KB).
2012, G4G10	-	A paper about tilings (2,661 KB) containing an overview of some of the many tiling patterns that I had found in my tiling research.
2014, G4G11	-	A paper about geometry problems (1,034 KB) arising from tilings.
2016, G4G12	-	Ziggy, a small packing puzzle.
2018, G4G13	-	1 to 8 Squared, another small packing puzzle, similar to Ziggy.
2022, G4G14	-	Walk a Crooked Path, a pen-and-paper puzzle.
2024, G4G15	-	Dodecasphinx, a small packing puzzle.

For the G4G12 and G4G13 exchange gift puzzles I have set up separate pages with extra challenges:

Ziggy
G4G12 Exchange Gift

1 to 8 Squared
G4G13 Exchange Gift

G4G Talks

The G4G attendees are invited to give brief talks. Here is a list of my talks:

2004, G4G6	-	No talk.
2006, G4G7	-	A 15 minute talk about Rotational Puzzles on Graphs, which was based on this page on my puzzle site. Slides (585 KB).
2008, G4G8	-	No talk.
2010, G4G9	-	No talk.
2012, G4G10	-	A 10 minute talk about my tiling research. Instead of slides, I used a special version of my Tiling viewer applet in which I added a sub-list of all the tilings I wanted to show.
2014, G4G11	-	No talk.
2016, G4G12	-	A 10 minute talk about the Comptometer, a mechanical calculator. Slides (8,905 KB). The talk was filmed and can be seen in this YouTube Video.
2018, G4G13	-	A 5 minute talk about recent developments in pentagon tilings. Slides (19,463 KB). The talk was filmed and can be seen in this YouTube Video.
2022, G4G14	-	No talk.