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Culture & Artsby Elizabeth Suman2:21 pmOct 5, 20100

Magic Math: “Mathemagician” to perform free show at Hopkins on Thursday

Forget hats and rabbits. Arthur Benjamin uses his brain.

Above: “Mathemagician” Arthur Benjamin

Forget rabbits, hats and flaming wallets. The most magical thing about Arthur Benjamin’s show is that he’s managed to get people excited about learning by using nothing but his brain.

The Harvey Mudd math professor and Hopkins alum, otherwise known as the “Mathemagician,” will be performing his show at the Hopkins Homewood Campus on Thursday.

Benjamin, who has performed everywhere from TED conferences and the Today Show to NPR and the Colbert Report, can translate your birthday into the day of the week you were born and compute the square of a five-digit number in under 20 seconds.

Benjamin shares his “mathemagic” methods at the end of each show, as well as in his book, Secrets of Mental Math, which children have bought and used to teach themselves Benjamin’s magic math methods – a result that thrills him.

As he told Johns Hopkins Magazine, Benjamin believes that the country’s math education would benefit from more mental math and less writing, and prioritizing statistics over calculus.

“Learning about randomness, risk and reward, statistical significance—it teaches critical thinking skills and has much more applicability in daily life than does calculus,” he told the magazine.

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Event Details
Thursday, Oct. 7 at 7 pm
Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus
3400 N. Charles St.
Hodson Hall, room 110
free and open to the public

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