I’m back from vacation! Yellowstone was great.
Here’s a little challenge (or point of interest) for anyone who likes magic. This video is an honest portrayal of a card trick (with somewhat overdramatic music). It works like this: a deck is shuffled perfectly, i.e., from wikipedia:
In a perfect shuffle or perfect faro shuffle, the deck is split into equal halves of 26 cards which are then pushed together in a certain way so as to make them perfectly interweave.
In the video, the card handler does 8 perfect faro shuffles in a row. The result is surprising. The mathematical challenge: why does this trick work?
(I had to solve this problem as a homework problem in a group theory class in college, but I remember hearing the question much earlier, and having a good time thinking about it.)
