Introduction to mathematical card tricks

Amaze and amuse your family and friends armed with just a deck of 52 playing cards and a little insider knowledge.

Mathematics underpins numerous classic amusements with cards, from forcing to prediction effects, and many such tricks have been written about for general audiences by popularizers such as Martin Gardner.

The mathematics involved ranges from simple ''card counting'' (basic arithmetic) to parity principles, to surprising shuffling fundamentals (Gilbreath and Faro) discovered in the second half of the last century.

We'll discuss several original and totally different principles discovered since 2000, as well as how to present them as entertainments in ways that leave audiences (even students of mathematics) baffled as to how mathematics could be involved.

Bio
Colm Mulcahy taught mathematics at Spelman College in Atlanta from 1988 till 2020. As a teenager growing up in Ireland, he read some early books of Martin Gardner, having no idea that decades later he would meet the great man and get to know him. Colm is currently the Chair of the Gathering 4 Gardner nonprofit Foundation, which stimulates curiosity and the playful exchange of ideas and critical thinking in recreational math, magic, science, literature, and puzzles to preserve and extend the legacy of writer and polymath Gardner. Colm has blogged for the Mathematical Association of America, The Huffington Post, Scientific American, and (aperiodically) for The Aperiodical; and his puzzles and writings have been featured in The New York Times and the Guardian. For 10 years he authored Card Colm, a regular column about mathematics and magic–especially card magic–for the Mathematical Association of America. Much of this work in this arena is collected in his 2013 book Mathematical Card Magic: Fifty-Two New Effects (CRC Press).