Martin Gardner died on Saturday. He was 95 years old.  It’s hard to give a sense of Gardner’s wide ranging interests and contributions to someone who’s not familiar with his writings. And he was a writer. According to the NY Times obit, there are over 70 books with his name on it. Not to mention of course the mathematical recreation column for Scientific American through which most people first heard about him (me included).

He was a gifted explainer of science, literature, and philosophy. One of this books, The Night is Large, has taken up permanent residence on my nightstand. I can flip open the book and invariably find something of worth on pseudoscience, Laffer curves (remember that?), Newcomb’s paradox, Alice in Wonderland, time travel, and an entire essay on the subject of nothing.

Here’s a brief excerpt from one of his essays on the 19th century pseudo-science of phrenology, which supposes a relationship between skull shape and personality:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Profile: Martin Gardner, the Mathematical Gamester (scientificamerican.com)
• Martin Gardner Remembered October 21st 1914 – May 22nd 2010 (wired.com)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zap! Invention to fight mosquitoes, malaria: Nathan Myhrvold on TED.com (ted.com)
• Mosquito Death Ray in Action at TED (mashable.com)

After Liar’s Poker, he wrote a string of best sellers about sports. His cheerily titled The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine marks his return to the Street. This time his focus is on a crew of renegade investors, Lewis alter-egos who have more contempt for Wall Street than the author, but managed to openly antagonize—unlike Lewis in his day— the larger powers while doing their day jobs.

Somehow Lewis makes you never tire of reading in paragraph after paragraph how collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) were traded as triple-A-rated bonds but only a few  saw their true worth, $0. He is a very, very good writer.

I’m not exactly sure how he turned bond tranches,  mezzanines, value at risk, credit default swaps, and other financial shop talk into a very readable narrative But he did, this is a page turner.  He has a writer’s bag of tricks that you begin to appreciate as the plot progresses:  it was inspired on his part to have these quirky outsiders  work out the mystery behind abstract derivative securities as Lewis added his own explanatory sauce to make the points stick.

I actually understood synthetic CDOs, which would not have possible if the book were an extended Wikipedia entry. Kudos to Lewis.

Once I grokked how connected these securities were I began to see how a waitress in Las Vegas not making her monthly mortgage payments could trigger a global economic meltdown.

I admit that I ended up liking Steve Eisman, Dr. Mike Burry, Greg Lippmann, and the rest of the cast—I’m sure Hollywood is eyeing this one. If you are as turned off by Wall Street and its worship of the sawbuck as I am, then you’ll come away from reading this viewing Lehman, Bear Stearns, Goldman, and the rest as Ivy League-educated crime families. It is that bad.

I wouldn’t call any of his characters heroes, though short sellers are the closest the financial world has to truth seekers. They weren’t disinterested in their detective work since a drop in the value of sub-prime backed CDOs would increase their investments in credit default swaps—that’s how you short a bond.

So even the moralizing Steve Eisman had pure self-interest in mind when he publicly asked embarrassing questions to Important Wall Street Men. The more that banks, hedge funds, and investors questioned the value of these murky securities, the better chance Eisman had in wrecking the party and achieving his own big pay day.

That’s about as close as you get to justice on Wall Street.