Mathemagician
mathematician and magician
A mathemagician is a mathematician who is also a magician. The term "mathemagic" is believed to have been introduced by Royal Vale Heath with his 1933 book "Mathemagic".
The name "mathemagician" was probably first applied to Martin Gardner, but has since been used to describe many mathematician/magicians, including Arthur T. Benjamin, Persi Diaconis, and Colm Mulcahy. Diaconis has suggested that the reason so many mathematicians are magicians is that "inventing a magic trick and inventing a theorem are very similar activities."
Mathemagician is a neologism, specifically a portmanteau, that combines mathematician and magician. A great number of self-working mentalism tricks rely on mathematical principles, such as Gilbreath's principle. Max Maven often utilized this type of magic in his performance.
The Mathemagician is the name of a character in the 1961 children's book The Phantom Tollbooth. He is the ruler of Digitopolis, the kingdom of mathematics.
Notable mathemagicians
Jin Akiyama
Arthur T. Benjamin
Persi Diaconis
Alex Elmsley
Richard Feynman
Karl Fulves
Martin Gardner
Norman Gilbreath
Ronald Graham
Vi Hart
Royal Vale Heath
Colm Mulcahy
W. W. Rouse Ball
Raymond Smullyan
References
Further reading
Diaconis, Persi & Graham, Ron. Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks Princeton University Press, 2012.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11936174. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1933, 1961 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mathemagician” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.