Lyndon Hardy

Lyndon Hardy is an American fantasy author and physicist, born in 1941 in Los Angeles. He trained as a physicist at Caltech and earned a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, then spent three decades working at the aerospace company TRW before founding his own computer consulting firm. He is best known for the Magic by the Numbers series, beginning with Master of the Five Magics (1980), which builds an unusually systematic, rule-based magic system around numbered branches of sorcery; he returned to the series with new installments beginning in 2016 after a long hiatus. Earlier in life, as a Caltech student, Hardy was one of the organizers of the 1961 Great Rose Bowl Hoax, a prank in which card-stunt instructions were secretly altered during a televised football game. He is a longtime member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.