 This is John and Jose, two friends I've made here, to shuffle some cards. Do you have it with you? Yes. So before we start, and wait, you can take the ad cards off. So you shuffle these deck, and I want everyone to see that all the cards are different. I'm sure people at the back can see this. You can see it, right? Yes. Okay, for time's sake, I'm just gonna ask you, what is the top card? Nine of Hearts. Nine of Hearts, great. And you shuffle this deck? Yes. Round of applause, please. Thank you. Magic! No, you can grab a seat, that's yours to keep. Jose, your turn. Can I see the cards really quick? And again, you shuffle these. And for you at the back, different. I'll do something slightly different. Deal the cards into my hand. What's that? Just one at a time, deal the cards down in my hand. Stop whenever you want. Are you sure? Yes. You don't want that card over there? No. That's unfortunate. So I want you to take the top card. And what card did you have? Nine of Hearts. What card's that? Nine of Hearts. Nine of Hearts! Oh! You guys can take your seats, thank you very much. Oh, you probably want these. I picked a card too before all of this started and I want to start right there. That's what I picked before all of this. So the thing I love about magic is that regardless of who you are, if you love magic and you have that reaction, you have a sensibility for math and physics. Because you and I both know I can't really make cards disappear or I can't really see the future. But in that one moment when you see something impossible happen, then I think we all let a little bit of probability theory creep in. You can't talk about magic without talking about math. And the reason I bring up all of this is because of my sister. See, she's an extremely intelligent person. She's brilliant at taking complex problems and breaking them down to simpler ones. And she likes abstract structures and how they relate. And she's also good at puzzles. And so back in high school, she's older than me, she came to a simple conclusion that I hear for some reason every time I tell people I love math. I have some thoughts about why this is. See, whenever people are doing math, I think we miss a lot of context. Because whenever we learn something new, we know that you can't start from the outside of the circle. You need to start from a place of knowing. And so even though most of us recognize that math is everywhere, I think for most people, if you're not a math person, you're on the outside. But I think that if you like magic and you like language and you have a knack for it, we have room for a conversation. See, in the future, I wanna do research in an area of math called the Langlands program. It's really technical and I can't explain the math behind it because I don't know it. But in my favorite book, Love and Math, Dr. Frankl says, look at each field of math as an island. And the Langlands program is about finding the bridges between these islands. Now, I didn't realize what the math was because of this, but for my sister, who has a knack for language, for her it was a bridge to having some context as to what mathematics is. It gave her context as to what questions are we interested in and what I wanna do in front of a chalkboard for the rest of my life. And so I want to ask, where does the context go missing? For a lot of us, for a lot of us, math becomes about solving problems playing follow the leader with the teacher. I think a part of that reason is not because teachers or students like it. It's just our education system, which is rooted in the Industrial Revolution. While it was good for the economic and cultural standards of the time, right now it just disengages people from learning. And so, as a result, people look at teaching as a sort of information dispensary and not where the conversation should be and I think is heading towards teaching as a dialogue meant to facilitate conversation and learning. And so when we're making education systems in the 21st century from here on out, we need to ask, what are the questions have we been asking? Why have we been asking them? And what do we need to ask from now on? Because that affects learning. Personally, also another reason, I think, is back in high school, whenever I looked at physics, history, philosophy, it was all a part of this web of knowledge that helped me see the world. And math was sort of its own thing on the side. Then it was its own separation. And so I think I realized later that while classifying patterns of questions into subjects is useful, it is just that, it's bookkeeping. And so I decided, let's break out of it. It turns out it can be fun. And if you haven't noticed, I'm obsessed with cards a lot and so one of my favorite principles is that of a perfect shuffle where you interlace the cards one after another. And you can look at this for those interested as a member of a symmetric group. But what I find interesting is this thing called an in shuffle and an out shuffle. An in shuffle is a perfect shuffle where top guard second from top and an out shuffle is when the top guard stays on top. And so if I want my favorite guard, nine of hearts, to go down to the 11th position, I wanna put 10 cards on top of it. And so convert 10 to binary for each one to an in shuffle for each zero to an out shuffle and it's there. And I found that beautiful because it connected something I love, cards, it's something else I love, magic. I think everyone here has beautiful interests and unique skills and passions. And I really think that those speak to our creative and critical skills. And that should be a point to start conversations, not stop them by saying I can't do something. So let's keep asking questions and let's be happy. Thank you.