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april 04, 2004
Puzzles + Math = Magic
New York Times: Puzzles + Math = Magic
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In the case of Mr. Ganson's machine, the wonder is at how complicated a mechanism was required to do something so apparently simple, in Mr. MacCready's at how simple a solution was needed to accomplish something usually so complicated.
In both, though, the wonder is how something is done. Magicians are also inventors, but spur astonishment not at how something is done — though that is always the question asked — but that it is done at all.
At one performance, the magician Jamy Ian Swiss asked an audience member to come onstage and close her eyes. He promised he would pass a wire hanger through her body without her feeling it. But he let the audience see precisely how the trick was done. The audience laughed at the trick's obviousness, but she, having seen nothing, was amazed. "Now which of you," the magician asked, "has had the better experience?"
The mathematician and puzzler dissent, of course, insisting that the best experience is in knowing. The goal is not illusion, but disillusion. See the coffee cup as a mechanism with magnets, show the palmed cards, explain why certain series of numbers act in a certain way.
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As the mathematician Peter Winkler said in one talk: "No matter how simple something is, there's room for it to be too hard to do."
Posted by hakank at april 4, 2004 06:34 EM Posted to Matematik