Gasps and applause filled the theater as award-winning magician and Georgia Tech professor, Matt Baker, keptthe audience in awe with his show-stopping tricks when he visited the campus on January 22, and delivered four performances to students and faculty throughout our three different grade levels.
Baker kicked off his display of talents to a 6th-grade class, focusing on the math side of his tricks and displaying the importance of probability in magic and the math that comes along with these seemingly impossible tricks, along with giving students a sneak peek into how he manipulates the tricks.
Math teacher, Ms. Castle, says, “It was really fun to see math and magic intersect. I liked how he involved the crowd. At Math Club, I enjoyed learning how he did some tricks using math.”
Baker’s biggest show was during a Middle School assembly as he called up a random guest from the audience to assist him. Baker made a bet with the student that if any card in the deck repeated colors, as in red, red, or black, black, the student won, but if the cards went in a red-black-red-black pattern, Baker won. The student shuffled and flipped them around to make the deck’s order as random as possible and then returned it to Baker who didn’t touch a card and then flipped it around and displayed it to the crowd.
As he displayed each card, it began as red, black, red, black, red, black, as the audience thought that it was a coincidence. But he continued with red, black, red, black, as he got to the last two cards, he read out, red, black. The crowd erupted in cheers.
Baker wrapped up his show with a disappearing ball trick in which he put a simple math equation on a piece of paper, reading out “3-1 +2” so he put two balls in one hand, and three in the other, then took away one. Then he asked the crowd what the equation equaled to, as everyone yelled out “zero,” he opened his hands with zero balls left in his hands.
Baker’s visit left the students with a new understanding of magic and math by blending both probability and math with entertainment and energy.
