Fooling Houdini, page 23
She slanted a dubious look my way. “Okay,” she said icily. “Sure.”
I showed her Paul Harris’s Bizarre Twist, a minimalist miracle in which an ace flips over despite being trapped between two other cards, then changes color in front of the spectator’s eyes. Everything is examinable, and only three cards are used—a real gem of a trick. (Paul Harris is a true visionary.)
Surprise flickered across her face. “Wait. What?” she said, brightening. “Show me another.”
I followed up with John Guastaferro’s Tailspin. Four face-up aces turn facedown one at a time, then instantly transform into another four of a kind named by the spectator. It doesn’t get much prettier than this. I fumbled through the Elmsley counts, which were still giving me trouble—Wes had been coaching me on this move—but managed an able rendition in spite of my nervousness.
Kate let out a warm laugh. “Wait,” she said. “Are you kidding me? Show me how you did that.” Here was my chance, I thought. It was a long shot, but I had to go for it. “I’ll tell you what,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Meet me for a drink later, and I’ll show you.” The few seconds of silence that followed were like an hour-long wait for test results at the doctor’s office after spring break. Her lips puckered, and she raised an eyebrow. Then she smiled and said yes.
After the drink came pizza in the Village. Cherry blossoms in Brooklyn. Indie films and Italian dinners. We got matching temporary tattoos. Not only did she love card tricks, but she thought physics was cool—sexy, even. I felt like I had the first time I walked into my therapist’s office and saw a copy of Ulysses on the bookshelf: she was a keeper.
Kate turned out to be more helpful than any drama workshop or chapter on Stanislavsky. She showed me how to block out an act, find my light, and project onstage. She became my acting coach, my Fosse. She was a talented actress and she had good taste. Whenever I’d start flourishing my fingers or revert to stock gags and magical clichés, she’d put her foot down and say, “Just be yourself.” Or if I made an off-color joke, she’d frown and let me know that “magic is creepy enough as it is. It really doesn’t need your help.”
When we first met, I was about to shell out a thousand dollars to study the sleeving methods that won Rocco Silano, an Armani-sheathed spellbinder from New Jersey, the Most Original Act award at the Magic Olympics in Stockholm. With Dean Martin playing, Rocco converted gas into water, water into ice, a corncob into popcorn, a kiss into lipstick, and distilled fruit, juice, cigarettes, pipes, ice cream, and Campari-filled highballs out of thin air. (I remember thinking that it’d be cool to have Rocco at a party, in spite of the mess he’d make on the floor.) After chatting with him over dinner at a Monday Night Magic after-party, I was ready to enlist in his boot camp. But Kate knew better. “That’s not you,” she said. She also found it kind of gross the way he played with his food. When I briefly considered a course in the art of needle swallowing—after spending a bunch of money on the instructional DVDs and beginner kits—Kate nixed those plans as well. “You’re a goofy physics geek,” she said. “Your magic should reflect that.”
Magicians like to pretend that they’re cool and mysterious, cultivating the image of the smooth operator, the suave seducer. Their stage names are always things like the Great Tomsoni or the Amazing Randi or the International Man of Mystery—never Alex the Magical Superdoofus or the Incredible Nerdini. But does all this posturing really make them look cooler? Or just more ridiculous for trying to hide their true stripes? Why couldn’t more magicians own up to their own nerdiness? Magic was geeky. And that was okay.
A lot of it just came down to acknowledging who I was not. There were a great many magicians I admired but would be hard pressed to emulate. I could never play the guido-fabulous lothario who pulls flowers and Campari from thin air. I would never manipulate cards the way Jeff McBride did. I wasn’t a con man or a cardsharp or a psychic seer.
There comes a point in your life when you realize it’s easier to accept who you are than it is to change it. For the longest time, I’d tried to shoehorn myself into different identities by imitating other magicians. I would buy magic tricks indiscriminately. At every lecture, I’d scoop up the package deal. I’d order books and DVDs and props as if ordering takeout. I thought I had to learn everything.
Now I began to realize that the vast majority of tricks just weren’t for me. That’s not to say that they didn’t look amazing in the hands of other performers, just that they didn’t suit my personality. I was reminded yet again of renowned English magician David Devant, who once boasted that he only knew six tricks. Because that was all he needed.
“Try to proceed with a kind of playful integrity,” Chris Bayes told us. “Because in that integrity we actually find more possibility of surprise than we do in an idea of how to trick us into laughing. You bring it from yourself. And we see this little gift that you brought for us, which is the gift of your truth. Not an idea of your truth, but the gift of your real truth. And you can play forever with that, because it’s infinite.”
These words set my mind in motion. Rather than hopscotching across the globe searching for secrets in distant corners of the world, what if I returned to the subjects that were nearest and dearest to me? What if I went back to what interested me as a math and physics buff? On reflection, I realized that I’d been doing tricks that relied in some way on the connections between magic and physics at least as far back as my disastrous appearance at the Magic Olympics. I now began to see those tentative first steps toward developing an act that combined magic and science as exactly the path I needed to follow. This time, however, instead of being a shtick, math and physics would be the heart and soul of my routine.
I realized right away that this approach might not win me a tournament or land me on television, but it would at least be truthful. “The problem with magic,” Eugene Burger told us at the Mystery School, “is that it’s often not sincere enough.” Magic will always be about deception, but within that framework perhaps one can still find a kernel of authenticity. And while I wasn’t exactly sure how math or physics was going to help me craft my routine, with the contest fast approaching, I decided it was worth a shot.
I knew, at least, that the connection between mathematics and conjuring went way back, to some of the oldest magic texts. I also knew that the relationship had always been somewhat strained. In his book Mathematics, Magic, and Mystery, Martin Gardner observed that math-based tricks were generally regarded with double disdain: magicians found them nerdy and tedious, while mathematicians dismissed them as trivial. This branch of magic was a bit like a child of divorce being shuttled back and forth between two parents, with neither parent wanting custody.
This disdain was not wholly unwarranted. Mathematical magic tends to be dry and procedural, a consequence of the fact that the underlying principles must be concealed somehow. This is usually accomplished by burying the secret beneath a slag heap of arbitrary moves—cutting, dealing, counting, and whatnot. As a result, the methods are frequently more interesting than the effects. But there are exceptions.
One name that kept popping up was Persi Diaconis, an eccentric silver-haired math genius and one of the world’s top statisticians. Magic, however, was his first love, and he’d always remained true to it, even as he climbed through the upper stratospheres of academia—Harvard, MIT, Stanford. In fact, it was in service to this love that he made the climb. At age fourteen, Diaconis dropped out of high school and left his home on Long Island to study with Dai Vernon. For the next decade, he shadowed Vernon, training alongside hustlers and cardsharps in gambling dens across the country. A naturally gifted magician, Diaconis soon became an underground legend.
He also showed an early gift for math—his lightning-fast ability to calculate gambling odds was crucial to his success at the table. So, ten years after he left home Diaconis returned to New York at Vernon’s behest and enrolled in night school. A few years later, he earned a full scholarship to study math at Harvard. Today, he’s a professor at Stanford and a two-time MacArthur Fellow, not to mention close friends with some of the world’s top magicians. He’s also rumored to have one of the most extensive private magic libraries on the planet.
It’s rare for a person to become a legend in two fields, let alone two so seemingly distant as math and magic. But from what little he’s written on magic, it’s clear that Diaconis views tricks through the eyes of a math professor. “Erdnase’s methods are not only novel for the time,” he wrote in the introduction to Vernon’s 1984 classic Revelations. “They are the right solutions to important problems.” Years later, speaking to a fellow math scholar, he likened the process of designing magic tricks to that of solving math problems. “The way I do magic is very similar to mathematics,” he said. “Inventing a magic trick and inventing a theorem are very, very similar activities in the following sense. In both subjects you have a problem you’re trying to solve with constraints.”
Diaconis has solved a number of famous math problems, many of which were inspired by his love of magic. In 2007, for instance, he proved that a typical coin toss isn’t perfectly fair; rather, it’s slightly biased in favor of whichever side the coin starts on, because of how coins are weighted. If it starts out heads, in other words, then heads is a marginally better bet. But Diaconis is perhaps best known for a 1992 paper he published on card shuffling—“Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to Its Lair”—which unraveled two long-standing mysteries in both mathematics and magic and turned out to have implications that went far beyond either discipline.
With the date of the IBM competition closing in on me, I decided I had to meet this man, if only to find out whether any of his mathematical insights might illuminate my own path. But when I asked people in the know about the possibility of arranging a meeting with Diaconis, I was quickly discouraged.
“He’s way underground,” said one well-connected source. “He’s super secretive. Hangs out with Ricky Jay. Guys you can’t even talk to.”
Really?
“Not about secrets at least.”
Apparently my meeting with Diaconis was not to be. But even on a road littered with obstacles, you’re bound to catch the occasional lucky break. As it happened, Diaconis’s coauthor on the card-shuffling paper was a professor in the math department at Columbia, a stone’s throw from the physics building. I e-mailed him to request a meeting and received a response the following day. Turns out he was giving a lecture that night on card shuffling. Gripped by a sudden sense of urgency, I canceled my plans, armed my fire wallet, stuffed my backpack with cards, and—with a reluctant Kate in tow—raced toward campus.
* * *
* I dug a little deeper, and it turned out that this study was not what the media had made it out to be. The study had nothing to do with clowns and mentioned them only in passing. In fact, there are mountains of evidence showing that clowns (as well as comedians and magicians) have helped hundreds of thousands of hospital patients. And that’s only the beginning. There are clown ministries and clowning troupes that engage in social protest on behalf of the disenfranchised. Clowns and jugglers and magicians have ventured into war zones and refugee camps to provide at-risk children with much-needed psychological relief. In short: Clowns good, British tabloids bad.
Chapter 11
The Perfect Shuffle
I first saw David Bayer—or part of him, anyway—in a movie back in 2001. A lot of people saw him that year, although most of them, like me, didn’t know it at the time. That’s because they only got to see a small part of his anatomy: his hands. His body and his face and his voice—every other part of him—belonged to Russell Crowe. But the hands belonged to Bayer.
Bayer was Russell Crowe’s hand double in A Beautiful Mind, the film about mathematician John Nash. It was Bayer’s beautiful hands that scribbled enigmatic formulas on the chalkboards and windowpanes of an imaginary 1940s Princeton. The film’s producers wanted a movie with real math in it, unlike the fairy-tale Good Will Hunting. (Remember the problem on the chalkboard in the MIT hallway that supposedly took the faculty two years to solve? Turns out it was an elementary exercise in graph theory that moviegoing mathletes cracked during the few seconds it was on-screen.) So the producers of A Beautiful Mind brought Bayer on as a consultant and later as an actor, and to this day he still gets residuals for his handiwork. Come to think of it, I’d met (and shaken) a lot of famous hands in my time: Simon Lovell, who did Ed Norton’s base deals in Rounders; Xtreme Card Manipulator Dave Buck, whose talented fingers flourished for Jeremy Piven in Smokin’ Aces; magician and actor Christopher Hart, whose right hand played Thing in the Addams Family movies. And now Bayer.
His class met just after six o’clock on a crisp October evening in a small seminar room on the second floor of Milbank Hall, the oldest building on Barnard’s campus, across the street from Columbia. Bayer walked into the seminar room sporting jeans and a T-shirt. After a brief introduction, he removed a deck of cards from his leather bag. He handed them out for inspection and asked us to shuffle three times. Being the resident card expert, I did the shuffling. Bayer then asked me to pick a card at random and bury it in the middle of the pack, after which he took the deck and scanned through the faces of the cards. Moments later, he removed a lone card and held it up for all to see. “Was this it?” he asked, smiling. “The ace of hearts?” Of course it was.
It may not have been as dramatic as a levitation, but this to me was an astonishing trick. It was the shuffling that made no sense. How could he have let me shuffle, not once but three times? Wouldn’t all that shuffling lose the card forever? He couldn’t have used a key card or a crimp or daub or a marked deck. And clearly he wasn’t employing sophisticated gambling techniques à la Richard Turner. He was a math professor, not a magician. There was no gimmickry or sleight of hand involved. Even if he’d known the order of the cards beforehand, shuffling would have ruined it. There had to be a catch—and the catch, Bayer explained, had to do with the peculiar mathematical properties of shuffling.
The trick we’d just witnessed was a modified version of an effect originally conceived by an American magician and chicken farmer named Charles Jordan, who lived in rural California during the early twentieth century. Jordan never performed publicly—instead choosing to earn his keep by selling tricks, raising chickens, and winning mail-in puzzle contests—but he did invent a number of groundbreaking card sleights, including two false counts still widely in use.
His most enduring legacy, however, was something called Long-Distance Mind Reading, a magic trick performed by mail. In Jordan’s original version, the magician mails a deck of cards to the “spectator,” who cuts the cards in half and shuffles the two halves together. The deck is cut once more, and a lone card is removed from one of the two piles. After noting its identity, the spectator places the card in the middle of the other half and sends it back to the magician, who identifies the selection a few days later by return post.
Jordan published a small ad for the trick in the back of the Sphinx, the premier magic magazine of his day, in the spring of 1916. At the time, it went unnoticed, perhaps because the mail was so slow. For almost a century it was all but forgotten, lost in the mire of history, like a buried treasure waiting to be unearthed.
Until Persi Diaconis came along.
The Jordan trick caught his eye because it suggested something counterintuitive about shuffling, namely that shuffling doesn’t work as well as most people think it does. Being a magician and a gambling expert at heart—his second deals, I’ve heard, are second to none—Diaconis wanted to understand shuffling from a mathematical point of view. If shuffling truly randomizes the cards, he reasoned, then Jordan’s trick would be impossible, because there would be no systematic way of locating the selection once the cards had been mixed. The fact that it was possible meant that the conventional wisdom on shuffling had to be wrong.
While at Harvard, Diaconis teamed up with Bayer, who was a postdoc at the time, and together they set out to test this hypothesis. Their task was to determine how many shuffles it takes to adequately mix a deck of cards such that no trace of the original order remains. Only after solving this problem would they be able to decipher Jordan’s mind-reading mystery.
Their best lead was a technical memorandum written by a mathematician named Edgar Gilbert at Bell Labs, the research arm of AT&T, which had circulated in the fall of 1955. The memorandum sketched out the first useful mathematical model of card shuffling, one that laid the foundation for all subsequent work on the subject.
Why would the world’s largest phone company have been interested in card shuffling? It all came down to probability. The phone company uses complex probabilistic theories to model switchboard capacity. The phone network connects people all over the country, so it has to be extremely spread out, but it also must be capable of handling variations in call volume, otherwise a spike in the number of calls can overload the grid—much in the way that when Michael Jackson died the massive surge of Internet queries temporarily brought down Google News. “They want to model all these random processes, so they care about probability,” Bayer explained. “Card shuffling was very much in the spirit of what they were doing.”
The phone company was also interested in how information can be transmitted over staticky channels. In 1948, in a landmark paper, Bell Labs mathematician Claude Shannon founded the field of information theory, a branch of mathematics concerned with measuring and quantifying information. What began as a theoretical investigation into signal processing turned out to have profound consequences. Biologists now use information theory to study genetic codes. Physicists use it to understand the digestive system of black holes. To the extent that it laid out a formal set of rules for how data can be stored and transmitted, information theory—along with its offshoot, coding theory—provided the mathematical framework for the digital age.
