Irving Joshua Matrix
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Irving Joshua Matrix (d. 1980) was a polymath scientist, scholar, and entrepreneur who made extraordinary contributions to perpetual motion engineering, Biblical cryptography and numerology, pyramid power, pentagonal meditation, extrasensorial perception, psychic metallurgy, and a number of other topics. He was an accomplished prestidigitator and an intuitive mathematician, two qualities which he put to good use in most of his enterprises.
Dr. (I. J.) Matrix, as he is commonly known, was a creation of mathematical columnist Martin Gardner, who reported some of his doings in the Mathematical Games column of Scientific American (starting in 1959). Little is known about his early life. He resided for some time in Japan where he learned the secrets of the conjuring art.
Dr. Matrix was often persecuted by establishment authorities, and many times had to change abode and live under assumed names. He was accused several times of fraud, although those crimes are now believed to be wholly imaginary. He reportedly died in a duel against a certain Ivan Skavinsky Skavar, in circumstances as obscure and dubious as most of his career.
He was survived by his daughter, Iva Matrix.