The 'Mathemagic' Touch Comes to Campus

Want to make your math homework disappear? Matt Baker ’94 has a better idea: Add the calculations to the tricks, and poof.

The Georgia Institute of Technology professor has garnered international renown as both a mathematician and a magician, one who often intertwines the two passions.  

“I work to unearth principles that people don’t know about that are useful in magic, and then make them entertaining,” said Baker.

He’s a co-organizer of the First International Conference on Mathematics and Magic sponsored this week by UMD’s Brin Mathematics Research Center. Around 40 participants are converging on campus to exchange ideas on the intersection of the two disciplines, with a group magic show for the public scheduled Wednesday at The Clarice.

First wowed by a magician as a 4-year-old, Baker stocked up on magic books and began performing at birthday parties around age 10. He paused performances while studying math at UMD—the campus didn’t have a magic club then, he said, but joining a student a cappella group improved his stage presence. He later joined the Georgia Magic Club and met influential mentors, like the late magician Simon Aronson. 

That helped him hone his “mathemagic” specialty: using classical mathematical theories to astonish without the traditional sleight of hand. It’s launched him to international stages, and even landed him on a 2023 episode of magic duo Penn and Teller’s show “Fool Us,” where he guided the pair to randomly select a bag of M&M’s and correctly predict who would have more of certain colors—and by what margin.

“Usually things that are procedural and have all that stuff going on get dull, and it really doesn’t,” Penn Jillette said of Baker’s trick on the show. “You created a really beautiful thing.”

In the classroom, Baker transforms the boring into the bewildering. To demonstrate number theory, he might instruct a student to multiply random numbers together to get a giant string of digits. Pick one of those digits, he tells them, and read the rest aloud. Baker then somehow announces which digit they’re thinking of.

“Magicians aren’t supposed to explain,” he said of teaching with magic, “but I view that as a soft commitment.”

The idea that magic can include scholarly inquiry as well as entertainment helped inspire this week’s math and magic conference, which Baker organized with Doron Levy, professor and chair of mathematics at UMD, and Art Benjamin, a math professor at Harvey Mudd College.

“We can use this as an opportunity to do something even bigger and teach students the philosophy, the psychology, the history of magic, and magic as a performing art,” said Levy. “Maryland could take the lead.”