Mathematics Commons^™

The Eight Monarchs (Some Mathematical Magic), Jeremiah Farrell, Eric Nelson

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The eight Monarchs are the four Kings and four Queens of an ordinary deck of cards. We can perform our magic without a deck by using the grid below with the K-Q token ( a coin can be used instead if one wishes).

The Effect: The magician's back will be turned while Mark, the subject, places the token on one of the suit nodes. Mark is to remember this starting position. Then Mark makes a sequence of moves; a move being one of four possibilities: a horizontal move, a vertical move, or a diagonal move to a new node or …

The Magic Octagon, Jeremiah Farrell, Tom Rodgers

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The black nodes mark the corners of an octagon and each of these nodes in connected to four others by lines. The (rather hard) puzzle is to assign the sixteen numbers 0 through 15 to each of the sixteen lines so that each black node has a sum of 30 when the line numbers leading into it are added.

The word version of the puzzle was described in the article "Most-Perfect Word Magic", Oscar Thumpbindle, Word Ways Vol. 40(4). Nov. 2007.

Octahedral Dice, Todd Estroff, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

All five Platonic solids have been used as random number generators in games involving chance with the cube being the most popular. Martin Gardenr, in his article on dice (MG 1977) remarks: "Why cubical?... It is the easiest to make, its six sides accomodate a set of numbers neither too large nor too small, and it rolls easily enough but not too easily."

Gardner adds that the octahedron has been the next most popular as a randomizer. We offer here several problems and games using octahedral dice. The first two are extensions from Gardner's article. All answers will be given …

The Magic Octahedron, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

An octahedral die has several advantages over its cubic cousin, not the least of which is its ability to magically model a four dimensional tesseract. We will use a four coloring of the die to illustrate the magic.