Royal Vale Heath

Royal Vale Heath (05 January 1883 – 25 July 1960) was a wealthy New York stockbroker and writer who became widely known as a magician and puzzle enthusiast.[1][2] His magic tricks were often based on mathematics and he introduced the term "mathemagic" to describe them in a 1933 book titled Mathemagic.[3] He was a frequent contributor to Scripta Mathematica,[1] Hugard's Magic Monthly, and The Jinx.[4]

He specialized in tricks involving dice, serial numbers and magic squares.[5] He once constructed a magic square that remained a magic square even when it was turned upside-down.

In 1988 his work was exhibited at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University.[5][6]

Heath played a crucial role in the career of popular mathematics writer Martin Gardner. At a magic show in 1956 he introduced Gardner to flexagons and these folded paper shapes became the subject of Gardner's December 1956 column in Scientific American which launched his quarter century tenure there.[7][8] Several of Heath's tricks have been collected in Gardner book Mathematics, Magic and Mystery.[9]

References
  1. Royal Vale Heath obituary The New York Times, July 27, 1960
  2. Royal Vale Heath Find a Grave
  3. "Mathemagic" by Royal Vale Heath and Jerome Sydney Meyer, Simon and Schuster, New York (1933)
  4. Royal Vale Heath Conjuring Archive: Searchable Magic Book Contents
  5. Special Exhibits Notices of the American Mathematical Society, July/August 1988, Volume 35, Number 6, p 840
  6. Mathemagic: Magic Squares and Other Designs By Royal Vale Heath David Winton Bell Gallery. August-Sep, 1988
  7. The Colossal Book of Mathematics: Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems by Martin Gardner, W.W. Norton & Company (2001), ISBN 0-393-02023-1, p.395
  8. The name "Mathematical Games" was not applied to Gardner's column until the following month: but the flexagon column was in all but name the first in the series of almost 300 columns which followed under that name.
  9. Gardner, Martin Mathematics, Magic and Mystery Dover (1956), ISBN 0486201104
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