Abstract
Interest in mathematics can often be generated by seemingly nonmathematical items. Perhaps not surprisingly, students cited card tricks as their favorite activity in a course in recreational mathematics that I taught to middle school students in Miami University—Middletown's “Kids in College” program. When a card trick was shown to them, the students were at first inclined to believe that the trick was based on magic or sleight-of-hand manipulation, asking such questions as, “How did you do that?” I answered that I hadn't done anything … it was “in the cards,” or, more precisely, in the mathematics of cards. Our pursuit of finding the mathematics in a particular card trick involved several important mathematical activities: problem-solving analysis, making a conjecture and testing it, discovering, and verbalizing.
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