Grok a Book

Magical Mathematics

The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks

Persi Diaconis and Ronald Graham

About the book

Magical Mathematics reveals several rich mathematical ideas that can be used to drive several magical effects with cards and more. The book is roughly in two parts, the first focused on card magic and the rest focused on magic with other artifacts, juggling, and several cool stories. In this reading we went over the first half (up to chapter 7).

Prerequisites

Basic comfort with mathematical reasoning. No prior experience with magic is required!

The original session pages carried interactive card demos (Hummer shuffles, de Bruijn windows, Gilbreath riffles, perfect shuffles). Those are being collected into a separate library of card interactives; the pages here are text summaries and will link to the interactives when the library is ready.

Sessions

11 of 13 sessions were recorded. Dates are IST.

  1. 1 Mar Royal Hummer ▶ 58 min notes
  2. 2 Mar Back to Magic not recorded notes
  3. 4 Mar DeBruijn with Color Patterns ▶ 1 h 04 min notes
  4. 5 Mar 2D deBruijn Patterns ▶ 50 min notes
  5. 6 Mar DNA Sequence Analysis + Middle Layer Graph Conjecture ▶ 48 min notes
  6. 7 Mar deBruijn Variant: LMH + Color Pattern Derivation ▶ 41 min notes
  7. 8 Mar deBruijn Variant: Suit Grouping Variation ▶ 58 min notes
  8. 9 Mar Gilbreath - Lie Detector ▶ 55 min notes
  9. 10 Mar Dealing Two Impressive Poker Hands ▶ 1 h 03 min notes
  10. 11 Mar Counting Gilbreath Permutations + Ultimate Principle ▶ 1 h 06 min notes
  11. 12 Mar Reverse Perfect Shuffle Application: Finding Partner Card ▶ 1 h 08 min notes
  12. 13 Mar Perfect Shuffles ▶ 1 h 12 min notes