Magical Mathematics | Spring 2025

Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks

Persi Diaconis and Ronald Graham

01 Mar 2025 to 21 Mar 2025
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 artifcats, juggling, and several cool stories. In this reading, we’ll go over the first half (up to chapter 7, if all goes according to plan).

Prerequisites

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

Logistics
  • We meet every day (with one weekend break) according to the schedule below at 9PM IST.
  • Any changes will be announced here and on this whatsapp group.
  • Recordings from the sessions will show up here.
  • Join us on Zoom via this link or by using meeting ID 935 8362 8138 and passcode hummer.
  • Subscribe to the Google Calendar for these sessions here (if you are already on a Google account) or download an ICS file here.

Reading Schedule

Date Lecture Slides Notes Video
01 Mar, 2025 Royal Hummer
02 Mar, 2025 Back to Magic
03 Mar, 2025 The Magic of de Bruijn Sequences
04 Mar, 2025 Going Further
05 Mar, 2025 Robotic Vision
06 Mar, 2025 Making Codes
07 Mar, 2025 To the Core of Our Being
08 Mar, 2025 This de Bruijn Stuff Is Cool but Can It Get You a Job?
09 Mar, 2025 Order Matters
10 Mar, 2025 A Mind-reading Effect
11 Mar, 2025 Universal Cycles Again
12 Mar, 2025 The Gilbreath Principle
13 Mar, 2025 The Mandelbrot Set
14 Mar, 2025 A Mind-reading Computer
17 Mar, 2025 A Look Inside Perfect Shuffles
18 Mar, 2025 A Look Inside Monge and Milk Shuffles
19 Mar, 2025 A Look Inside Down-and-Under Shuffles
20 Mar, 2025 All the Shuffles Are Related
21 Mar, 2025 The Miracle Divination
22 Mar, 2025 How Many Magic Tricks Are There?
No matching items