Jessica Appel Assignment 1

Recently I have been thinking about the overwhelming presence of math in aspects of life that, prior to studying math so rigorously, I would have never thought about. This has led me to the conclusion that math is essentially omnipresent. To me, discovering the math behind magic tricks is just another example of the far-reaching prevalence of math.

Magic has always been one of those things that I never wanted to think too hard about, or I would become frustrated at my inability to understand how it works. I always wanted to know the trick behind the illusion. Now that I’ve been made aware of the fact that there are magic tricks rooted in math, I’m confident that I can understand them.

I believe that math and magic are not necessarily the same. Math can be, and is, used to create certain types of magic, but to me these two words are not synonymous. They are however quite closely related. Magic is just another way to apply math (albeit a very fun way to do so). When we create a magic trick using math, we are forcing these two things to be the same. What seems to the untrained eye to be magic is inarguably rooted in math.

A few days ago my roommate demonstrated a card trick to me in which she first dealt the cards into stacks. The number that appeared on the first card drawn for each stack would determine how many cards were in that stack. Any extra cards she would keep in her hand. Then she asked me to pick three of the stacks, and added the rest of the stacks to her hand. She then asked me to pick two of the remaining three stacks, and flipped over the top card in those two stacks. She then added together the numbers on these two cards, and counted out that many cards of those in her hand. The card she ended up on was the same number as the top card in the third stack.

Although I have yet to determine what the specific mathematics of this card trick are, I definitely believe they exist. I thought about the modulus in the number of cards that are counted in each stack and how it might lead you to the correct end card, but either the trick does not care about the modulus or I wasn’t using the correct numbers.