Do you believe in magic?
Witness!
And marvel….
The Stellar Sebastian can sift through your thoughts, sees what you see, and reveal your secrets with some ‘simple’ code and a love for both maths and magic.
A bespectacled man in khaki shorts hovers his hand over the head of his bubbling participant. Within the enchanted silence, he triple-checks his math before playing at teasing the thoughts from his beautiful assistant’s brain, pulling out a magical bag of puns with every dramatic reveal of the card he gets right and right and right again. An eight of hearts and, finally, an ace of diamonds for the gem his partner has been.
Jason Sebastian Connie is an example of fandom we rarely hear about. Fans have gone from being those creepy lurkers who talk way too much about a specific shot in a specific scene in a certain adaptation to “the inmates running the asylum” according to a recent article in Quartzy. Published on the 15th of April this year it details the ways fandoms have come to influence Hollywood’s media to its reported detriment. After a long history of simply taking what is given to us we have wrested hold of and become co-creators of our passions; puppeteering from our couch cushions and rioting for change on twitter. This assessment, admittedly, is fair and so is the article in its claim that fandom now has great power to be used for both good and evil. In this uncertain climate, Jason’s particular niche of fanhood is proof that established fields of work and study can be successfully merged with geekdom to produce wonders.
As a kid, Jason had a lot of fun blowing things up with colourful fire. Green fire was his first experiment and that sense of exploration has followed him ever since. Applied Mathematics has ended up being the ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ that dabbles in everything.
Currently in his honours year in Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town, Jason gets to really dip his hand into the top hat of academic fields with his subject of study having connections to Quantum Computing, Cosmology, Environmental Science and even social dynamics. He recounts an example of the undoubtedly complicated mathematical work with a steady tone of reserved interest and smiles occasionally as his mind is transported back. His demeanour then transforms, becoming more daring and jovial, at the opportunity to express his mathematical powers. A friend of mine joins us so that I can take notes and wonder.
“Okay, so, I give you a deck of cards,” Jason begins.
“I ask you to cut the deck, as many times as you want, not shuffle. A very badly-behaved participant shuffled the deck sometimes and this ruins the trick, just a bit.”
“Give it back to me when you’re satisfied that it’s been cut enough.”
“Then I put out five cards for you.”
“I turn around, close my eyes really hard; and I ask you to look at the cards without changing their position, just look at the cards, turn them back down after looking at them.”
“And when I now come back, eyes wide open I ask you to point to the red cards. So tell me which ones are red.”
“All of them,” his lovely assistant declares.
“All of them?”
“All of them,” she confirms.
“After you say so, I can read your mind and tell you what each card is with the suit and the number.”
Jason tells me the trick works off something called De Bruijn sequences, which are basically binary codes formed from algebra. Each binary sequence is 2k long where k = any number, positive or negative, but is absolutely whole. Solving this equation gives you the binary sequence. Every three-digit sequence within that binary sequence occurs only once and like any algebra equation you actually manage to solve, you just need the value of that one constant to decode the whole thing. Et voila: mathemagical mind reading.
Math and magic are a true marriage of interest for Jason who humbly claims to be incapable of sleight of hand and as such has found a brand of wonder all his own. Jason, like a surprising number of other mathematicians, has very literally proven that science is magic.
I can certainly count myself as one of the believers.
Sources
https://quartzy.qz.com/1207341/fan-service/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/deBruijnSequence.html
http://slideplayer.com/slide/3373112/
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