Magic Through Math: Exploring Probability, Cryptography, and Chaos

Do you think you lack the skills to perform magic like the ones we see on TV shows and entertain your friends at tea time? It's time to rethink! In this semilab, we will see how super fun magic tricks can be constructed from important mathematical principles and how these principles appear in real-life applications. We'll discuss notions and relationships between special shuffles and famous themes in mathematics, such as parity, De Bruijn sequences, probability, Markov chains, and dynamic systems, including the famous Mandelbrot set. We will also show how this relates to computer vision, cryptography, and even DNA. No special (math)magical powers will be required from the participants.