Where Math and Magic Meet  by Andrew Kerr November 2006 Dr. Matt Baker is a mathematics professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In his scant spare time he has pursued his hobby of magic. We discussed the intersections of math and magic and the shared philosophies of both fields. |
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This interview was conducted November 2, 2006. Q - What first piqued your interest in magic? A - I had a cousin who showed me magic tricks. I remember one in particular that he did. He had a little box and he put a piece of rubber across the top of the box, and he put a rubber band around it and he put a quarter on top, and he pushed the quarter right through the rubber into the box. I must have been ten years old or something like that, and I still remember very vividly him showing me that. I had another cousin who now lives in Texas. Every time I saw him he would show me magic tricks. He used to do birthday parties for kids. He bought me my first magic book, which was Harry Lorayne's Close-Up Card Magic. After that I was hooked. I started doing some birthday parties myself when I was thirteen years old. My little brother was my assistant. I continued doing magic throughout high school and college, but it sort of petered out a bit as I had many other extra-curriculars; at some point I ran out of time. So I didn't do any magic for a long while. But then I got back into it. I was a visiting professor at the University of Paris in summer 2003, and one night I went with another mathematician to a magic cafe. The waiters came around and they started doing magic. The kind of magic they do is "table magic" with ordinary stuff: cards and coins and rubber bands. So the waiter said, "Look I've got two interlocking rubber bands, they're made of solid rubber, and yet they can penetrate right through each other just like that." [Matt demonstrates the trick with two rubber bands. He wraps each band around the spread fingers of each hand. Then, it appears that he glides the stretched bands effortlessly right through one another. It's pretty freaky-deaky.] I became a little bit obsessed with trying to figure out how to do that. I didn't ask the guy. He was French; I speak a little French but it wasn't going to be easy to learn it that way. So I came home and I dug up my old stuff. I looked through my old books, but they didn't describe this trick anywhere. So I went on the Internet. I found some cool websites that have all kinds of magic stuff. I found a video where a magician named Michael Ammar explains this effect. I ordered the video, I watched it, and I sat in front of the TV until I was able to do it. In the meantime I discovered the world of DVD's. They're much better than video tapes for learning magic because you can rewind and pause and skip to whichever thing you want to see and do it over and over again. Q - What's magic culture like here in Atlanta? There's an Atlanta Society of Magicians that I belong to. We meet once a month, get together at a restaurant, have dinner and then everyone shows a trick after dinner. It's a little hard to have a new effect prepared every month. There are some pros in there and they know how to do all the standard things, so if you want to surprise them or do anything they find interesting you have to work pretty hard. I also belong to the Atlanta chapter of the International Brotherhood of Magicians (IBM). Q - There seems to be a statute of limitations regarding when the secrets behind certain tricks can be revealed to the public. A - I think that's true. Some effects are so old and so well-known that some magicians have felt like it's public domain now. So Penn and Teller explain a bunch of things in their TV specials and some magicians are really mad about that, but other ones say, "What can you do?" I don't divulge any secrets, except in one situation. Sometimes I give lectures on math and magic, and in that case I will usually explain the mathematical principles behind what I'm doing, because that's the point. So I take things that are not part of standard, professional repertoire and expose that. No profesional magician is going to be upset by revealing these secrets, presumably. It's for a good cause. It's for education. But I actually asked. There's a guy, his name is Rolando Santos, and he works for CNN here in Atlanta. He's a top executive there, and he's also a magician, and he writes a column for this national magazine called "The Linking Ring" on magical ethics. So I actually asked him if it was ethical to give these lectures where I give away the secrets to mathematical magic tricks. I explained the circumstances, and he assured me I wasn't doing anything against the magician's code. He actually wrote about it in his column the next month. Q - Who attends these lectures you do on math and magic? A - Last year there was a conference called NCSSSMST at Georgia Tech for magnet high school students, and there were lots and lots of students from all around the country. I gave a half-hour lecture there. And then I did one lecture at the GA Tech High School Math Competition which the School of Math runs every year. I also gave a performance over this past summer to a group of seventh grade high school math teachers who were taking a teaching class at Georgia Tech. Q - During your demonstration here at CEISMC, a coworker described a trick to you and you were actually able to figure out how the trick was done. Is it safe to say that most magic tricks draw from a few of the same basic principles? A - That one I was able to figure out because it's putting two separate principles together. The trick he described was basically two separate effects that I know about but I'd never heard them put together in that way before. I knew how each part was done, so it wasn't hard to put them together, but actually it's a nice idea to combine them! Q - A classic part of many magic performances seems to be the trick that seemingly goes wrong, and then the surprise at the end where it actually goes a hundred times better than it was supposed to. A - You usually don't tell your audience what you're going to do in advance, and if you do you normally need to have a twist. If I say I'm going to change your card into the five of clubs, it better not be actually what I'm about to do! Of course in card magic and coin magic, there are basic moves that you have to master because they come up in many different routines, but it's a bit of a mix and match thing that once you know these basic tools you can put them together in different ways. I guess it's like learning to write. You learn certain constructions, you learn certain principles about how to write well, but there are infinitely many ways to put it all together. That's where the creativity and originality come from. Q - Is most of magic based on the same well-known principles, or are there still totally new ideas that come from out of left field? A - There are both. Sometimes there's a totally new idea. I guess that's kind of rare now, but there are genuinely new principles that every once in a while come out. Most of the tricks that I do are based on well-known magical principles. But I try to put my own spin on the presentation, because it feels like something creative and original if I present it in my own way. So a lot of the patter that I have involving, say, knot theory: that's my own presentation. Nobody else I know presents the trick that way. And the joke about "bygones be bygones", those things are my own touches that I just throw in there. So in general all the lines that I say are my own, but the mechanics of what I'm doing is something fairly standard within the magical community--but hopefully not outside! Q - Does having a mathematical mind make magic easier to do? A - I think it gives me an edge in terms of understanding why certain tricks work. There are a number of card tricks that are based on mathematical principles. I would say there are a lot of magicians that do card tricks and they don't actually know why they work. They just read the instructions, they do it, it works, and they never actually know why it works. And so I think one advantage that I have is my mathematical background and my logical analysis background helps me understand exactly why things work. Occasionally that's useful. If you mess up you can fix it sometimes, you can reverse engineer it in your head. And sometimes it allows me to think a little faster. There are some tricks where you have to do some calculations in your head. Also I would say that it helps occasionally in trying to design original tricks. There are some really clever ideas that are based on mathematics, and again in order to create variations on these effects you have to be able to understand how they work. I've played with variations on certain mathematical principles. I don't think I've ever invented anything that's going to make it into the Magic Hall of Fame, but it's fun to play around with. I think magic helps with teaching. One, because I can use it occasionally in the classroom. I try not to overdo it because my job is to teach them math, not to show them magic tricks. But sometimes it's useful. I was teaching applied combinatorics, and we were talking about how many ways you can color the faces of a cube using a certain number of colors. I brought in a Rubik's cube, and I did a magic trick where I scrambled up the Rubik's cube and threw it up in the air and it solved itself. Just to kind of wake up the students that were sleeping! I did another trick that I learned about from a video that I saw. The mathematical idea behind it wasn't actually explained in the video, but it was not hard to figure out why it worked. The reason it works is actually related to one of the theorems I was discussing in my combinatorics class! So I actually did the trick in class and then we went over why it works. It turns out that it's based on a theorem of [Leonhard] Euler about graphs that was covered in our textbook. Q - I think it's a testament to the beauty and the power of the human mind that these magicians who perhaps don't understand higher-order mathematics can still experience the same concepts on this abstract level. A - What I like about both areas, math and magic, is you do see how clever people are, and how amazing human creativity is. Some of the ideas are so beautiful. Of course there's the spectator side of magic where you watch and appreciate, but one of the fun things about doing it is when you learn how things are done. On the one hand it takes away the mystery, so if you see somebody else do it you're like yeah, [in bored voice] OK, I know how that's done, it's not as impressive anymore. But on the other hand some of these ideas are so clever, and so creative, that it's really fun. There are some magicians who are amazingly clever, and I really admire the way they think and the way they put ideas together. They take known things and put them together in a new way. That's exactly what the great mathematicians do as well; they take known ideas, come up with some new ones, and then put it all together in a new way and knock your socks off. Q - Are there other mathematician/magicians out there? A - There's a guy named Colm Mulcahy in the IBM club, the International Brotherhood of Magicians, who's a math professor at Spelman College. He actually writes a column for a national math magazine about mathematical card tricks. But for the most part the magicians have more blue collar jobs, or their job is being a magician. There are not too many people from academia, especially not pure stuff like math! Q - A few months ago I wrote an article about comedians at Georgia Tech. They said there's a lot of overlap between holding an audience's attention in a club and holding the attention of students in a classroom. A - Magic can be quite nerve-racking if you're not really confident about what you're doing because you're worried about messing up. There's a certain confidence that comes with being a teacher. And performing magic gives me a lot more confidence to stand up in front of the class and just talk and be myself. So yeah, there's certainly some synergy between the two. One of things that I do, besides the magic club that I mentioned, is a group called Project Magic that meets about once a month. We go to DeKalb Medical Center and we perform for some of the patients there. It's a small group of us that does that, and that's a lot of fun, you get a totally different kind of audience, obviously, than you would get performing in a high school or in a college classroom, and of course it's a fun thing for someone with nothing to do in a hospital to see. Project Magic was actually started by [magician] David Copperfield many years ago, and it goes on in various places around the country. I also do some birthday parties for kids, but to be honest it's not really my favorite activity any more, because it's very difficult. I find that my experience teaching college students is of almost no use when I'm standing in front of a group five year-olds! My set that I do at birthday parties is completely disjoint from the things I showed you guys here. I have a whole other repertoire with big props-- Q - Doves and bunnies? A - I don't have the resources to keep livestock in my house, that would be nice. But I have some rabbits that change color -- not real rabbits, just some painted rabbits that change color -- and I've got this "pin the tail on the donkey" trick where the tail disappears and reappears. They're fun things, but that's really a different set of skills. It's difficult to stay sharp with everything, to be able to entertain adults and kids and people in hospitals, too. You have to do different material and present it in a different way. Lately I feel like the kids are a little bit too challenging, and I'm going to cut down on the children's shows. Q - Are kids more skeptical these days? A - There's a certain age group that's very skeptical, I haven't performed enough for different ages to really have pinpointed exactly what the cut-offs are. 3 year-olds and 4 year-olds are great to perform for because they just love everything and eat it all up. But then at a certain age, maybe around 7, especially if they're boys, they're very skeptical, they're very rowdy, and they'll just, unless you have really really good crowd control skills and very good rapport with the kids, they will eat you for breakfast! So I've had a couple of shows where I felt on the verge of losing control. I'm a little bit cautious now about performing in front of 7 or 8 year-old boys. Especially birthday parties. In schools they're better behaved and in certain other environments they're well behaved, but I think if they're trying to impress their friends by how much they know, then that's the end--you can just give up. Of course there are some professional performers that have spent their lives mastering how to deal with such things. My wife has now seen me do so many magic tricks that it's impossible to impress her anymore! So she's supportive that I have this hobby, but she doesn't really want to see it anymore unless she has to. My wife's parents, on the other hand, are my biggest fans. Whenever they visit they ask me if I can do some magic for them, and they just love it! Web Resources (-- Show --) |
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