Card tricks can impress audiences, and the magic behind it all is mathematical.

The 2025 Niven Lectures will bring in Matthew Baker, a professor mathematics—and magician—from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The two lectures will be held at 220 Chapman Hall.

A lecture at 4 pm Tuesday, April 8, will explore the mathematical principles used in card shuffling magic and how it’s connected to the Mandelbrot set, a fractal shape. Intended for undergraduates, this event will conclude with recently discovered links between fractal shapes and the combinatorial theory of necklaces.

Then at 4 pm Wednesday, April 9, a lecture for general math audiences will explore a 2013 discovery that a set of spanning trees in a plane graph naturally forms a group, modulo the fact that there is no distinguished identity element. The lecture will generalize this fact to ribbon graphs, i.e., graphs embedded in orientable surfaces of arbitrary genus. In addition to shedding light on the role of planarity in the earlier work mentioned above, the results represent one of the first substantial applications of “orthogonal matroids” to a natural combinatorial problem about graphs.