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Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature – especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was also a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century". He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.
Shuffling is a procedure used to randomize a deck of playing cards to provide an element of chance in card games. Shuffling is often followed by a cut, to help ensure that the shuffler has not manipulated the outcome.
Persi Warren Diaconis is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University.
51 (fifty-one) is the natural number following 50 and preceding 52.
93 (ninety-three) is the natural number following 92 and preceding 94.
170 is the natural number following 169 and preceding 171.
Card manipulation is the branch of magic that deals with creating effects using sleight of hand techniques involving playing cards. Card manipulation is often used in magical performances, especially in close-up, parlor, and street magic. Some of the most recognized names in this field include Dai Vernon, Tony Slydini, Ed Marlo, S.W. Erdnase, Richard Turner, John Scarne, Ricky Jay and René Lavand. Before becoming world-famous for his escapes, Houdini billed himself as "The King of Cards". Among the more well-known card tricks relying on card manipulation are Ambitious Card, and Three-card Monte, a common street hustle also known as Find the Lady.
A trick deck is a deck of playing cards that has been altered in some way to allow magicians to perform certain card tricks where sleight of hand would be too difficult or impractical.
Gilbreath's conjecture is a conjecture in number theory regarding the sequences generated by applying the forward difference operator to consecutive prime numbers and leaving the results unsigned, and then repeating this process on consecutive terms in the resulting sequence, and so forth. The statement is named after Norman L. Gilbreath who, in 1958, presented it to the mathematical community after observing the pattern by chance while doing arithmetic on a napkin. In 1878, eighty years before Gilbreath's discovery, François Proth had, however, published the same observations along with an attempted proof, which was later shown to be false.
Cardistry is the performance art of card flourishing. Unlike card magic, cardistry is meant to be visually impressive and appear very hard to execute.
Alex Elmsley was a Scottish magician and computer programmer. He was notable for his invention of the Ghost Count or Elmsley Count, creating mathematical card tricks, and for publishing on the mathematics of playing card shuffling.
This is a glossary of conjuring terms used by magicians.
The faro shuffle (American), weave shuffle (British), or dovetail shuffle is a method of shuffling playing cards, in which half of the deck is held in each hand with the thumbs inward, then cards are released by the thumbs so that they fall to the table interleaved. Diaconis, Graham, and Kantor also call this the technique, when used in magic.
Brother John Charles Hamman S.M. was a close-up magician and Marianist Brother. The tricks he invented are still an integral part of many close-up magician's repertoire. Hamman was world-renowned in the magic community. His initial interest in the art started as a child. As he recuperated from polio, he spent hours learning, practicing and inventing card tricks and other magic involving sleight-of-hand. In many cases, he "reinvented" classic maneuvers or streamlined them. He was a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, the Catholic Magicians' Guild and the Society of American Magicians.
In mathematics, the "strong law of small numbers" is the humorous law that proclaims, in the words of Richard K. Guy (1988):
There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them.
A Gilbreath shuffle is a way to shuffle a deck of cards, named after mathematician Norman Gilbreath. Gilbreath's principle describes the properties of a deck that are preserved by this type of shuffle, and a Gilbreath permutation is a permutation that can be formed by a Gilbreath shuffle.
In the mathematics of permutations and the study of shuffling playing cards, a riffle shuffle permutation is one of the permutations of a set of items that can be obtained by a single riffle shuffle, in which a sorted deck of cards is cut into two packets and then the two packets are interleaved. Beginning with an ordered set, mathematically a riffle shuffle is defined as a permutation on this set containing 1 or 2 rising sequences. The permutations with 1 rising sequence are the identity permutations.
Stewart James was a Canadian postman who became one of magic's most prolific inventors. He spent most of his life in Courtright, Ontario.
The art form of card flourishing, commonly referred to as cardistry, grew out of simple flourishes used in close-up magic by magicians in the 1990s to early 2000s. Chris Kenner's notable two-handed Sybil cut from his 1992 publication Totally Out of Control has carried great influence and gave birth to a series of advanced flourishes which today represents the foundation of the performance art. Sleight of hand pioneers Dan and Dave Buck popularized cardistry on the world stage with their instructional DVD releases from 2004 and 2007. Journalist Kevin Pang of Vanity Fair characterized the art of card flourishing as, "It's yo-yo tricks performed by cardsharps with the street cred of a Parkour video. There's a name for it: cardistry."
Bruce Cervon was an American magician who was best known for his close-up magic, both through performance and invention. He published a series of books and helped to create a permanent record of the magic of Dai Vernon through The Vernon Chronicles, Dai Vernon's Ultimate Secrets of Card Magic, and Bruce Cervon's Castle Notebooks.
References
- 1 2 The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks by Persi Diaconis & Ron Graham, Chapter 5: From the Gilbreath Principle to the Mandelbrot Set, Princeton University Press (2011), ISBN 978-1-4008-3938-4
- ↑ The Second Norman Invasion Mathematical Association of America, August 2006
- ↑ Norman Gilbreath in Magicpedia.
- ↑ The Gilbreath shuffle, The Linking Ring, Volume 38, No. 5, July 1958.
- ↑ A Quarter-Century of Recreational Mathematics by Martin Gardner, Scientific American. August 1998.
- ↑ R. B. Killgrove and K. E. Ralston, On a conjecture concerning the primes. Math. Comp. 13 (1959), 121–122.
