2025 · Card Magic

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Old and New Tricks with Cards

A Short Course on Card Magic

Prof. Ramprasad Saptharishi, TIFR Mumbai

Card magic is a fascinating blend of mathematics, psychology, and performance art. In this short course, we’ll explore some fundamental principles of card magic, focusing on mathematical techniques that create seemingly impossible effects. While the focus will be on self-working tricks and the math that drives them, we will also cover practical and presentation aspects of card magic.

This course is open to anyone interested in magic, mathematics, or both! No prior experience with card magic is required. Participants should bring a standard deck of playing cards. If you are at IIT Gandhinagar, sign up through our short course mechanism. We will shortly post a link to a WhatsApp group that you can join to stay up to date on proceedings.

About the Instructor

Prof. Ramprasad Saptharishi is a faculty member in the School of Technology and Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).

He completed his Ph.D. under the guidance of Manindra Agrawal from Chennai Mathematical Institute. Following his Ph.D., he was a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India for a year, hosted by Neeraj Kayal and Satya Lokam. Subsequently, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University hosted by Amir Shpilka before joining TIFR.

His academic interests are in pseudorandomness and derandomization, algebraic circuit complexity, and broadly anything with an algebraic flavour. He also happens to be a connoisseur and performer of card magic!

Dates and Time

Dates: March 15 and 16, 2025
Format: Hybrid, but in-person recommended! Join us at Jayshree S Sheth Learning Theatre (1/102).
Time: 10AM-1PM and 3PM to 6PM on both days, with coffee and performance breaks
Zoom details: Meeting ID: 951 8057 7008; Passcode: 297620