ENIAC's 50th anniversary is not the only event attracting attention at the Moore Building this week. Ron Graham, the self-proclaimed juggling mathematician, spent yesterday afternoon explaining to about 50 students and professors how he has applied principals of mathematics to juggling and vice versa. According to College and Engineering junior Raj Iyer, who organized the event, Graham is an internationally known juggler and mathematician who has served as president of the American Mathematical Society. The event attempted to show how juggling can illustrate complex mathematical problems involving algorithms, while also demonstrating new juggling tricks. The speech, co-sponsored by the Dining Philosophers and the mathematics honors society Pi Mu Epsilon, began as Graham diagrammed some basic catch and throw sequences on the blackboard, while then proceeding to demonstrate them using balls. "The basic question is how many juggling sequences exist in a given period with a given number of balls," explained Graham. The majority of the hour-and-a-half presentation resembled an upper-level math lecture, with Graham proving his assumptions on an overhead projector. The complex mathematical concepts were geared toward determining whether or not a given juggling trick is possible and how it needs to be done. His calculations showed that while some tricks sounded complicated, many were actually quite simple -- at times using only one ball. "This shows that anybody can do some of these tricks," Graham joked, as he threw a single ball up in the air. Graham, currently director of the Information Sciences Center for AT&T; Research, said many jugglers are involved in mathematics and computing-related fields. "Juggling is a vehicle that explains a problem," Graham said. "When you understand the math, you can apply it back to the juggling to create new tricks." Mathematics graduate student Peter Selinger described the event as a "piece of educated entertainment."
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