 Well, thank you very much. That's a tough introduction to follow. Thank you so much for your support of MoMath. It's a real honor for me to be here with such a distinguished audience. It's also a real honor to be the first chair at MoMath for the public dissemination of mathematics. I have to say it's one of the most fun jobs I've ever had, for sure. I get to tell the public about the mathematics of the mega-millions lottery. I spent several hours doing that today. And if you want, there's still two hours left for to buy the ticket tonight. The drawing is at 11. You have to get a ticket by 10.45. So even you don't have to leave the gala early to get a ticket. I also get I spend a lot of time talking to the public about the mathematics of traffic signals and subway schedules and how to maximally and optimally adjust those to increase efficiency in morning commutes. I get to talk about mathematics and music and how mathematical patterns are used to make beautiful music. In particular, I got to do that with Marcus Miller, who's earlier here, playing the sax. And finally, this semester I have a privilege of giving a mini course for the public at MoMath about the mathematics behind magic tricks. All these everyday life activities that have mathematics in them are ways of conveying mathematics to the public and exciting the public about mathematics. And it's been a real privilege to be able to connect mathematics to so many of daily life activities at the museum this year. And I look forward to doing that all year. I thought today, since I'm doing this course on mathematics and magic at the museum at the moment for the public, that I'd show you a couple of small examples of the kinds of ways that mathematics enters magic effects. And so I'll give you a couple of small examples of that, literally very small examples, at all of your play settings should be four cards. And it's kind of amazing to think that with four cards you could do anything. But in fact, this is one of the favorite things for mathematicians is that there is great complexity in simple things if you look for it. And there's great simplicity then in that complexity. And so that's what I want to talk about a little bit. So everyone take your four cards. Can you hear me okay back there? So what I want everyone to do is take your four cards, just keep them face down. Don't look at them. You can take one look if you want first, but after that just keep them face down and shuffle them however you like, keeping them face down. Everyone content with how they shuffled it? Okay. And then maybe just for good measure give it one more cut. So give it a cut. That just means that you take some number of cards from the top and move them to the bottom. Okay. Okay, so now what I want you to do is take a peek, just take a peek at the bottom card. So make sure you remember that card. That's going to be your card. So it's important that you remember it. Okay, so everyone remembered their card. Okay, now what I want you to do, so I'm going to ask you to do certain manipulations. You'll have choice in what manipulations you do. I'm going to try to watch everyone simultaneously and then try to find everyone's card. Okay, by certain manipulations. Okay, so just listen to the directions. So first what I want you to do is take the top card and move it to the bottom. So now you have hidden your card, right? Okay, and once you've done that, I want you to take the top card and turn it over. Okay, now here's where you have the choice and what I want you to do is just cut the deck however you like. So that means take zero, one, two, three or four cards from the top and move them to the bottom, right? Just cut the deck however you like, yeah? Okay, and then this is the move that may be new to you. What I want you to do is spread out the top two cards as if they're one card, right? And turn them over. Everyone got that? Okay, so let's do that again. So cut the deck however you like and then spread out the top two cards. Okay, spread out the top two cards and turn them over. I think most of you did that, right? I'm watching. Okay, one more time. Cut the deck however you like. Cut the deck however you like. And we'll do that one more time. Spread out the top two cards and turn them over. And then maybe just for good measure, cut the deck however you like. Okay, so now you've all been doing different things, right? You've all been cutting however you like while you're spreading out top two cards and turning them over. But, okay, I'm now gonna try to find your card. Okay, so let's see. Maybe first I want everyone to turn over the top card. Okay? Now take the top card and just move it to the bottom. Move one more card to the bottom and now turn over the top card. Now what I claim is that three cards are gonna be facing one way and one will be facing the other way. That's your card. Does that work? So how many people did that work for? How many people did that work for everyone? Okay, almost everyone who did it. All right. So if it didn't work for you, all right, one person didn't work for over there. So if people are asking to do it again, I don't think we have enough time to do it again. If it didn't work for you, this is a trick based entirely on mathematics. If it didn't work for you, that means you didn't follow the directions quite right somewhere. But what is amazing is that just in four cards there was so much mathematics inside that even though you have free choice on so many of the moves, I can still find your card. So that's it. Okay, I'll do one more effect that needs two volunteers. I just asked one volunteer just a few minutes ago. I thought everyone should know who he is since he wasn't speaking today. The chair of the Board of Trustees, John Overdeck. I thought he should come up. He is a large reason that our museum exists and we're so grateful to him and we're happy to have you here on stage. All I want you to do, just check, this really is a normal deck of cards. No special markings. The only thing different about it is a little bit bigger than your normal deck of cards. Otherwise it is just your normal deck of cards. And I just want you to shuffle these however you like. It's not so easy to do a riffle shuffle, but you can just, you can do cuts, you can take out, yeah, let's do it. As good a job as shuffling as you can. Oh, it's pretty good. And then maybe we'll get one more volunteer. Maybe we'll have the executive director of the museum come up. Cindy Lawrence, everyone. So I'll say more about Cindy in a second. So maybe just give it one more cut just to make sure that the top card's changed. You can give it a cut, John. And give it one more cut just to make sure. Okay. And okay, so John, what I want you to do now is just give, I'm gonna ask you to give five cards from the deck to Cindy. Cindy, you have to keep them secret so you're gonna keep them close against your chest so that nobody can see, especially me. Okay, so give, so give Cindy five cards. Just hold them close to your chest towards you so I can't see, yeah, and just keep them towards you so I can't see. And you can shuffle them however you like. You can move them around. And what I'm gonna have Cindy do just, I just wanna tell everyone, Cindy's been working so hard for this gala. While I've been at the museum, I'm watching, she's running around everywhere and staying up all night in addition to doing all our museum activities around her class. That person is just as amazing a lot to you. Cindy, what I'm gonna ask you to do is you can look at them and I want you to show, put up four cards on that easel, face up, and then I'm gonna ask you to just put the last one face down. Okay, so that, and keep them close to you so no one can see. Does it happen? Can I look? Okay, so you put up four cards, face up, and one card face down. And well, what I'm trying to do is figure out what the fifth card is. Is it, is it possibly another eight? Is it an eight of diamonds? So those are the kinds of things we're doing at the museum these days. And we'd love to have your continued support so we can keep up these activities at the museum. So we're looking to do a lot of these kinds of activities, math and magic, math and traffic, math and music over the year. We look forward to your continued support. I'm really looking forward to spending the year doing these kinds of fun activities for the public over the course of the year. Looking forward to seeing many of you there as well over the course of the year. Thank you so much. Thank you.