Mental Magic: Surefire Tricks to Amaze Your Friends

by Martin Gardner, Jeff Sinclair (Illustrator)

Overview

A barber in Chicago says he'd rather cut the hair of ten red-headed men than the hair of one brown-haired man. Can you guess why?
Ask Professor Picanumba, a master of riddles who carries dozens of surefire tricks up his sleeve. He'll show you how to astonish your friends and family by predicting the answers to 88 word and number challenges. These tricks require only simple props — a deck of cards or a couple of pairs of dice, a calculator, and a pencil and paper. With or without an audience, these foolproof feats of mental magic offer hours of amusement. Solutions appear at the end, with 64 illustrations in between.
Author Martin Gardner has written more than 70 books on subjects from science and math to poetry and religion. Well known for the mathematical games that appeared in Scientific American for decades and for his "Trick of the Month" column in Physics Teacher magazine, Gardner has had a lifelong passion for magic tricks and puzzles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486474953
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	01/14/2010
Series:	Dover Kids Activity Books
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Martin Gardner was a renowned author who published over 70 books on subjects from science and math to poetry and religion. He also had a lifelong passion for magic tricks and puzzles. Well known for his mathematical games column in Scientific American and his "Trick of the Month" in Physics Teacher magazine, Gardner attracted a loyal following with his intelligence, wit, and imagination.

Martin Gardner: A Remembrance
The worldwide mathematical community was saddened by the death of Martin Gardner on May 22, 2010. Martin was 95 years old when he died, and had written 70 or 80 books during his long lifetime as an author. Martin's first Dover books were published in 1956 and 1957: Mathematics, Magic and Mystery, one of the first popular books on the intellectual excitement of mathematics to reach a wide audience, and Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, certainly one of the first popular books to cast a devastatingly skeptical eye on the claims of pseudoscience and the many guises in which the modern world has given rise to it. Both of these pioneering books are still in print with Dover today along with more than a dozen other titles of Martin's books. They run the gamut from his elementary Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing, which has been enjoyed by generations of younger readers since the 1980s, to the more demanding The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings, which Dover published in its final revised form in 2005.

To those of us who have been associated with Dover for a long time, however, Martin was more than an author, albeit a remarkably popular and successful one. As a member of the small group of long-time advisors and consultants, which included NYU's Morris Kline in mathematics, Harvard's I. Bernard Cohen in the history of science, and MIT's J. P. Den Hartog in engineering, Martin's advice and editorial suggestions in the formative 1950s helped to define the Dover publishing program and give it the point of view which — despite many changes, new directions, and the consequences of evolution — continues to be operative today.

In the Author's Own Words:
"Politicians, real-estate agents, used-car salesmen, and advertising copy-writers are expected to stretch facts in self-serving directions, but scientists who falsify their results are regarded by their peers as committing an inexcusable crime. Yet the sad fact is that the history of science swarms with cases of outright fakery and instances of scientists who unconsciously distorted their work by seeing it through lenses of passionately held beliefs."

"A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful?" — Martin Gardner

Table of Contents

The Tests
Wonderland Spell
A Mysterious Matrix
Cards that Shake Dice
Try This on a Dollar Bill
The Magic of 8
Around the Square
Nation, Animals, Fruit
The Red and the Black
The Exact Word
A Two-dice Test
A Curious Count
A Rotating Matrix
Catch the Bill
Five in a Row
Reverse, Subtract, Add
A Geometry Test
Monkey Business
Face-Up Cards
What's on the Paper?
Count the Clips
Number, Flower, Color
In Praise of Red
Three Heaps
Fold and Trim
Number Names
A Test with Two Dice
Think-a-Letter
Turn Two and Cut
The Rotated Die
An ABCABC Number
A Domino
chain
The GRY Test
Whisk the Dime
Beast, City, Vegetable
A Test with Your Age
A Surprising Sum
Around the Solar System
Think-a-Digit
A Remarkable Number
Heads or Tails?
Drop the Coin
At the Apex
A Calculator Test
A Peculiar Series
Rotating Spoon
Another Calculator Test
Four Queens
A Four-Dice Test
A Test with 66, 246, 913, 587
Funny Fractions
Topsy Turvy Fun
A Trick with Three Dice
Four Kings
Pairing Cards
Where's the Dime?
What's the Word?
Three Surprises
Another Calculator Surprise
A Surprising Fraction
Where's the Ace?
A Letter in Washington
Four File Cards
The Missing 8
An 8-Card Test
An Unexpected Number
Five Coins
The Stubborn Rubber Band
The Rotating Tubes
A Three-Dice Stack
One, Two, Three
Test of finger Strength
A 3 by 4 Test
The Curious Q
The Four Knights
Around the Circle
Deal and Switch
Insect, Animal, Bird
The Six Glasses
End of a Chain
A Yardstick Prediction
In Praise of Blue
Odd or Even?
Row of Nine
Nine-Card Spell
Lincoln Up or Down?
A Royal Finish
Twinkle, Twinkle
The Professor Predicts
Epilogue
About the Author
Index