Manjul Bhargava and the magic of mathematics..
For a few years, I was the resident magician at my son’s birthday parties. That stopped when the kids realized I was repeating the same three tricks. (Funny how you can’t pull wool over the average four year-old’s eyes). Still, I always thought one of those three was a pretty good trick. You ask someone to memorize a card out of a pack, then without ever looking at the faces of the cards, you deal them into three piles, thrice. After the third time, still without looking, you pick out the memorized card. Except with jaded four year olds, it always sets off delighted gasps. What makes it work? No sleight of hand, but just simple mathematics. And that’s why I’m thrilled to find that one of the winners of the 2014 Fields Medal—the big prize in mathematics—teaches a variant of this trick in an entry-level mathematics course. In fact, it’s apparently a whole semester worth of magic: the course is called the Mathematics of Magic Tricks and Games. What a route to learning and loving mathematics.
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You only need a cursory familiarity with the work of magicians like Derren Brown and David Blaine to realise that at the heart of many illusions lies a piece of rock-solid