Tangente: You present yourself as a "mathemagician". Have you always combined mathematics and magic?**
Yves Meret: The two came into my life almost simultaneously: I became a tenured teacher on September 1, 2004, and a magician on September 17 of the same year. I have practiced both activities for twenty years now. At first I kept the two separate: I worked on the classic fundamentals of magic – dexterity, close-up, stagecraft, and so on. It was not until 2016 that I truly merged mathematics and magic.
With Pierre Boc, a great French magician, we explored the "mathematical three-card monte", a trick described in Martin Gardner's book Mathematics, Magic and Mystery [Dover Recreational Math, 1956]. In trying to understand this trick, which relies on the symmetric group of transpositions, I discovered an incredibly rich world, full of genuine mathematical gems.
Today, my practice of "mathemagic" falls into two broad categories: visible mathemagic, where the mathematics is obvious to the audience, as in impressive calculations or magic squares created before their eyes; and invisible mathemagic, where the mathematics stays hidden, as in certain tricks based on binary principles or subtle algorithms I have memorized.
