Dany Waller Assignment 1

Math has always been a very vague concept in my mind, an abstract process of which I am simply an observer. Magic is similar as I see each "trick" as a complex series of steps to arrive at the desired conclusion, another process where I am most often an observer. They evoke the same feelings of wonder, but I have dedicated more of my time to participating in math so my academic interest has always been primarily of mathematical applications.
I view math as a world that is easier to enter initially, but both math and magic require hard work to understand a trick before you can apply it's methods to full effectiveness. I don't think there is any force required to mesh math and magic, they are inherently related through the art of careful counting, but there are times I think that math will explain a magic trick that has not yet been thought of, and vice versa, a magic trick that will inspire new math.
The card trick that Dr. Readdy and Dr. Ehrenborg perform in their classes where students are given cards that were shuffled in a certain manner, then the professor names the order of the cards using only information from the first card, has always impressed me. I understand that there is a pattern that arises in the shuffling and distribution of the cards but it seems very obscure, and that was what originally sparked my interest in the intersection of math and magic.