And it again, it brought home to me the way in which Martin Gardner was at the hub of a vast universe of brilliant, sparkling intellect — including people like Marvin Minsky [at] the M.I.T. artificial intelligence lab; and John Conway who at the time was in England and later came to Princeton and who invented so many deep and fascinating mathematical ideas, especially the Game of Life, to which Martin devoted several columns and which was an incredibly important thing in bringing new ideas to the world of computation and about the
cellular automata; and Donald Knuth at Stanford, the great computer [scientist]; Perci Diaconis a statistician who is fascinated by paradoxes of probability and a great magician
as well; and Ray Hyman, a psychologist who had a spent a great deal of his life debunking people such
as [Uri Geller]; and James Randi, one of the great magicians of our era who also was one of the most important debunkers of pseudoscience in the world.
In their Physical Review E paper from 2009, mathematicians Janko Gravner of University of California, Davis, and David Griffeath of the University of Wisconsin — Madison approximated flake formation using a technique known
as cellular automata.