Angela Vichitbandha - Assignment 1
Unsurprisingly, some things that immediately come to mind when I think about math are the basic areas we learn when we are young: arithmetic, probability, algebra, and so on. As a math student, I am also becoming familiar with areas where general properties are far more important than numbers and math seems to lose the solidity that typically characterizes the field in most people's minds. But if anything, I believe that generalized math is more solid than that which relies on specific cases. Perhaps these generalizations do not directly exist in the real world but they are intrinsically true and what is more solid than something that is always true? Ultimately, this is what I believe to be the idea of math: generalized properties that can be rigorously proven, specific cases of which can be applied to describe natural phenomenon.
Automatically, I associate the word magic to the sort found in fantasy novels and less to interesting tricks by stage magicians. For the first, this sort of magic seems like it should be the direct opposite of math, as a mystical, unknowable art but I especially enjoy magic systems that, though they cannot exist by our laws of physics, do follow the rules of their universe and so effectively function as a strange sort of science. As a result, like any other science, math must be deeply intertwined with it. On the other hand, when talking about stage magic, the effects are always the result of well-defined processes (though some processes require significantly more skill to pull off than others). Many times, the magic behind the trick is obscuring these processes from viewers, but that doesn't change the fact that it is a well-defined process. I believe that math permeates pretty much anything because math is so general anyways. In many instances, the math is not actually useful but it is always present somehow.
In recent years, most of the magic tricks I have seen were through the YouTube channel Numberphile so they are always heavily math-based. The one that comes to mind first (whether by chance that I watched it fairly recently or that I found it particularly interesting, I'm not sure) is one that picks out the viewer's card from a deck of 21 by properties of modulo. Once the viewer's card is shuffled in, they cards were systematically separated into 3 modulo classes then recombined three times, which allowed the magician to select the correct one based off position in the deck. It is a relatively simple trick, but the math behind it was clear to me which made it more interesting.
Automatically, I associate the word magic to the sort found in fantasy novels and less to interesting tricks by stage magicians. For the first, this sort of magic seems like it should be the direct opposite of math, as a mystical, unknowable art but I especially enjoy magic systems that, though they cannot exist by our laws of physics, do follow the rules of their universe and so effectively function as a strange sort of science. As a result, like any other science, math must be deeply intertwined with it. On the other hand, when talking about stage magic, the effects are always the result of well-defined processes (though some processes require significantly more skill to pull off than others). Many times, the magic behind the trick is obscuring these processes from viewers, but that doesn't change the fact that it is a well-defined process. I believe that math permeates pretty much anything because math is so general anyways. In many instances, the math is not actually useful but it is always present somehow.
In recent years, most of the magic tricks I have seen were through the YouTube channel Numberphile so they are always heavily math-based. The one that comes to mind first (whether by chance that I watched it fairly recently or that I found it particularly interesting, I'm not sure) is one that picks out the viewer's card from a deck of 21 by properties of modulo. Once the viewer's card is shuffled in, they cards were systematically separated into 3 modulo classes then recombined three times, which allowed the magician to select the correct one based off position in the deck. It is a relatively simple trick, but the math behind it was clear to me which made it more interesting.
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