Introduction

YAUB (Yet Another Unfocused Blog)

The author seems to be a very curious fellow in both senses of the term. Anyone with a Ph.D. earned with a dissertation entitled "Permutations by Cutting and Shuffling: A Generalization to Q Dimensions" must be the sort who loves to seek out knowledge, and be the type of person that will catch your interest once you get him talking. Whatever the man is really like, I'm glad he wrote this book.

Good recreational mathematics books have always been rare, and I fear they are not becoming any more common. There are many books that fall into a tourist guides to mathematics for the layperson and lack a single line of non-trivial mathematics. Such books usually annoy me. Such books beg me to imagine a Sister Wendy introduction to art, without pictures. You can't just read that Renoir made wonderful pictures, you need to see the pictures. Somehow, people believe that they can just write in broad generality about a concepts like wave equations or fractional dimensions with no mathematics and the reader will absorb some useful or insightful knowledge. More often than not, people just start believing they understand things they do not.

With Magic Tricks, Card Shuffling, and Dynamic Computer Memories, S. Brent Morris manages to make a math book that a layperson can read, enjoy, and learn, in several ways. Those who fear math can skip the lines of equations and learn a few really nifty card tricks. The more math-comfortable might learn a little about how combinatorics can tame very confusing problems. The engineer, especially the embedded programmer, might become inspired to tackle some familiar problems dealing with memory management in non-intuitive ways. Those who really like combinatorics will enjoy working through the proofs.

All this being said, I should emphasize that this is never a truly "easy book". Even the card tricks are demanding. The tricks are based on perfect shuffles which entail cutting a deck into two 26 card piles and perfectly interleaving the two half-decks. Doing this creates patterns most of us would never guess. After eight perfect shuffles a deck is back in it's original order. Perfect shuffles on even decks have a much different effect than perfect shuffles on odd decks. And yes, these perfect shuffles really can be used to design dynamic memory systems for computers. Someone who can do perfect shuffles consistently can do really amazing tricks. If you are able to handle cards with the precision of a brain surgeon while an audience watches, this book has lots of really nifty tricks for you.