The third Math Webinar in English took place on Wednesday, April 7th, 2021 from 5 pm until 6 pm with Robert Vallin, Founder of the Special Interest Group of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) on Recreational Mathematics (SIGMAA REC), as our invited speaker. This virtual event was free and open to the general public.
In this third Math Webinar in English, Robert Vallin presented on “We Begin with a Deck of Cards…” The speaker began the virtual event by showing some numbers that are related to the cards, highlighting the number of ways we can order the 52 cards in a deck. Robert Vallin also made a prediction trick, showed the solution to the water and wine problem by using 8 red cards and 8 black cards, and described the rules of Bulgarian Solitaire and some variants. The speaker also showed several different ways of shuffling cards, performed a magic trick that is based on the Gilbreath principle, and explained how playing cards are related to permutations, graphs, partitions and other math concepts.
