The Mathematics of Juggling

​Do you want to talk about juggling ? You may have seen people practicing juggling, or even tried this art yourself, but have you ever had a serious and scientific "discussion" about how juggling works in a first place ? In this seminar, I would like to lead you on a journey on the mathematical foundations of juggling. After a brief historical overview, I will attempt to explain how to model, recognise and construct juggling patterns, and understand their inherent structures, presenting results of brilliant minds, such as Claude Shannon, more know for his scientific contributions on information theory than his juggling skills (although he could juggle 4 balls on a unicycle), and who published the first theoretical results about juggling. In order not to loose the connection to reality while dealing with modular arithmetic and heavy graphs, I will showcase most of the patterns we'll discuss using a few juggling balls.

​I have been juggling for about 15 years, and there is no greater pleasure when two seemingly opposite passions of mine, such as juggling and mathematics, intertwine in such a beautiful way. Whether you have knowledge or not about either mathematics of juggling, I think you will be anyway able to appreciate the danse they perform together.

​Most of this talk will be based on the book "The mathematics of juggling" by Burkard Polster.

​Paul Rolland has a PhD in ML and optimization from EPFL and is now working as a Senior Data Scientist at the Swiss Data Science Center.