Magic Tricks, Card Shuffling and Dynamic Computer Memories (Spectrum)

Here is a book that explores the fascinating interconnections between three seemingly unrelated topics. The reader need have no specialist mathematical background to follow the text beyond high school mathematics, which makes it suitable for budding magicians and students of all ages. It is a fun book that looks at the mathematics of the perfect shuffle and develops the procedures for controlling dynamic memories and doing some clever card tricks. Each chapter begins with the description of a card trick and ends with its explanation, usually using some mathematics developed earlier. The book itself is designed as a prop for a trick, but you don't need to use mathematics or even understand it to do some 'magic'.

S. Brent Morris has a PhD and an AM in mathematics from Duke University and an MS in computer science from Johns Hopkins University. He is believed to have the only doctorate in the world in card shuffling; his dissertation is entitled Permutations by Cutting and Shuffling: A Generalization to Q Dimensions. He holds two US patents on computers designed with shuffles, and he has been a mathematician with the US government since 1975.

He became interested in the perfect shuffle in high school and has pursued its mathematics for over 30 years. He worked his way through college and graduate school as a magician. He has been invited to lecture at the Smithsonian Institution, Board on Mathematical Sciences of the National Research Council, NASA Goddard Space flight Center AT&T Bell Labs, NEC Research Institute, the National War College, the Joint Mathematics Meetings, and over 100 colleges and universities.