Math Is Magic

By day, Tori Noquez is a math professor. But by night, she’s a magician. She tends to keep these two parts of herself separate — until she performed a card trick for Penn & Teller on national television. At that point, for Tori, the cat was out of the bag.

Tori discovered magic at age 22 when she joined her mom at an event at the invitation-only Magic Castle in Los Angeles.

“It was just the coolest thing I'd ever seen or done,” says Tori, who graduated from Mellon College of Science in 2008. “I immediately went home and signed up for their classes.”

Today, she performs at venues across the country — including headlining The Magic Castle, where she’s a member of its Academy of Magical Arts.

A professor at St. Mary’s College of California, Tori teaches undergraduates and conducts research in category theory, a branch of formal logic. She says performing is not that different.

“A lot of math research, like magic, requires very strange and beautiful creativity, and this is the same approach I take to performing magic, where I want to think outside of reality and how I can share that with my audience,” she says.

A close-up magician, Tori’s routine involves classic sleight-of-hand card tricks with a personal spin, and original tricks, like the one she did for “Penn & Teller: Fool Us.” She perfected her craft as she pursued a master’s degree at UCLA and a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

She was drawn to cards because they are an everyday object that people are familiar with.

“Most people have a deck of cards in their house, have played card games, have handled cards,” Tori says. “I'm very attracted to how ordinary that is and that something magical is happening with them.”

As she’s delved into card magic over the years, she noticed that two staples of the craft have some mathematical underpinnings.

“It turns out they both have a lot of mathematical properties that aren't super well understood or super well represented in the magic literature currently.”

She’s compiled her findings, from both a mathematician’s and a performer’s perspective, into a series of what she’s calling lecture notes that she hopes to publish. She’s given lectures on the topic at several magic clubs, explaining how certain properties can be exploited in the development of a card trick.

Tori’s ability to take these sorts of building blocks and create new tricks impressed the world-famous team of Penn & Teller, who called her trick “very original” with “a beautiful reveal.”

And although Tori didn’t fool them — they figured out how she pulled off the trick — it was still a dream come true for her to perform for her magic heroes on a Vegas mainstage.

When her research and teaching schedule allows, Tori performs at magic clubs across the country, including venues in L.A., Boston and Chicago. She doesn’t have a background in acting or performing, so on stage, she’s just her authentic self — but that comes with a certain mystique, she says.

“There's this stereotype that math is mysterious and that you must have some supernatural ability to be good at math. It kind of plays naturally to the audience that I've got some skill set that to them is somehow magical.”