<\/p>\n
Students watch magician Randy Goodman prepare cards and materials at the front of a lecture hall on Friday in MSB 359 at UCF. Goodman\u2019s appearance marked the Pegasus Math Club\u2019s first meeting of the semester and drew its largest crowd yet.<\/p>\n
Juanita Olarte<\/p>\n
A classroom whiteboard transformed into a numbers matrix on Friday as magician Randy Goodman turned mental arithmetic into close-up illusions for UCF students.<\/p>\n
The presentation was Friday at the Pegasus Math Club\u2019s first meeting of the semester. A packed room gave the organization its largest turnout to date, with over 40 people.<\/p>\n
The event commemorated the legacy of Martin Gardner, the prolific author who spent decades illuminating the intersection of recreational mathematics, logic puzzles and stage illusions. Goodman, resident magician at The Boca Raton Resort Hotel, previously served as a guest speaker for Gathering 4 Gardner in November 2025 at Florida Atlantic University.<\/p>\n
\u201cMath, puzzles and magic, I think you can combine these and make any of them look like any of the others,\u201d Goodman said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t always have to be with a silk or a coin. It can be with numbers, and it can be seemingly impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n
During one demonstration, Goodman solicited random birthdays from attendees seated across the room, landing on March 30 and Oct. 23. Using those digits, he filled out the top row of a 4-by-4 grid with three, 30, 10 and 23, which totaled 66. Moving swiftly across the board, Goodman completed the remaining rows. Every column, row and inner 3-by-3 corner cluster added up to 66 across 45 separate combinations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Magician Randy Goodman presents to attendees at the front of a lecture room, holding lecture notes beneath a presentation slide, on Friday in MSB 359 at UCF. The demonstration was a 90-minute workshop on the art of magic and math.<\/p>\n
Juanita Olarte<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people see math as kind of just a boring thing,\u201d Mailley Worden, senior mathematics major, said. \u201cHonestly, I was making a lot of connections. I feel like some of the things that I learned, I was like, \u2018Wait a second, I feel like I know what he\u2019s doing here.\u2019”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Worden, a tutor at the Math Success Center, said the presentation made classroom theory feel active and visual.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Unlike high-end resort gigs on the Las Vegas Strip or in South Florida, Goodman designed the university appearance to be educational.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“At the resort, those are just pure entertainment,” Goodman said. “Here, I’m going to show how every single trick is done.”<\/p>\n
Rather than keeping his methods secret, he spent the final portion of the meeting teaching students two reproducible, math-based tricks.<\/p>\n
He first revealed the mechanism behind a calculator routine where volunteers chose any three-digit number, repeated it to make a six-digit figure and sequentially divided it by seven, 11 and 13. Goodman said that repeating a three-digit sequence is algebraically identical to multiplying it by 1,001, the exact product of seven, 11 and 13, which cleanly cancels out and leaves the volunteer holding their original starting number without a remainder.<\/p>\n
Goodman then taught attendees a card prediction based on Miraskill, a principle developed by magician Stewart James in the 1930s. Using the analogy of two 50-passenger buses swapping boys and girls, he demonstrated how parity and mathematical conservation ensure predictable card distributions regardless of how thoroughly the deck is shuffled.<\/p>\n
Goodman said he hoped the workshop would inspire students to explore mathematics through creative lenses outside the standard syllabus.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMath is magic,\u201d Goodman said.<\/p>\n
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