Thoughts
Everyone wants to be the next Martin Gardner. Everyone wants to do recreational mathematics.
You can't read Gardner, and make a Youtube video, and be the next Gardner. Gardner *invented* recreational mathematics. He found things Mathematics had never heard of and introduced them.
I love Vi Hart and her content, and she introduced me to Gardner. Her following and reputation is deserved. But she's not, and shouldn't be, a famous mathematician. She's making mathematics accessible to the public, but she's not doing new math. The same goes for Numberphile, and 3Blue1Brown, and all the other math Youtube channels.
My concern is that Recreational Mathematics is a "field" of math, and the topics discussed are the same topics that Gardner introduced years ago. Recreational mathematics should be a philosophy of math. Recreational math should be people *doing* math for the fun of it, and right now it is people *learning* about (or else teaching) math for the fun of it.
Matt Parker is one of the few channels that gets this, and Matt makes a point of trying to do new math, for the fun of it. He has made videos responding to 'dumb' questions people have sent in. Questions that *don't matter*, but are still super important in furthering our understanding of math, and demonstrating the mathematic process.