DO THE MATH!

: Juggling with Numbers

Author(s): Erik R. Tou
Source: Math Horizons, Vol. 21, No. 3 (February 2014), pp. 5-7
Published by: Mathematical Association of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.4169/mathhorizons.21.3.5 .
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do the math!
Juggling with Numbers
Erik R. Tou

I
f you love puzzles, as I do, you might already
know the “word morphs” game. The rules are
simple: You are given a starting word and an
ending word, and must gradually change (or,
morph) the starting word into the ending word in
stages. At each stage, you are allowed to change a single
letter from the word, and the result must be a valid
word. For example, suppose you want to morph the
word “bird” into “park.” Here is one way to do it:
BIRD
BARD
BARK
PARK
Simple, right? Well, it turns out that one of the foun-
dational results in the mathematics of juggling relies on
a numerical variant of the word morph game. But to
understand that fact, we need to explore how to make
juggling numerical.
Juggling has a long history, with the oldest known
depictions appearing in one of the ancient Egyptian
temples at Beni Hasan (c. 1994–1781 BCE). Georg
Forster, a Prussian scientist who accompanied Captain
James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific Ocean Stefan Paridaen, dejongleur.be
(1772–1775), writes of Tongan women who could juggle
up to five gourds at a time. During most of this long
history, juggling was the province of entertainers and height is not directly related to the physical altitude of
artists, though there was some overlap with other the ball. Rather, height has more to do with the tempo of
intellectual pursuits, including mathematics. Only in the pattern being juggled. Also, a throw of height 0 cor-
the 1980s did jugglers develop a way to keep track of responds to a skipped beat; no ball is caught or thrown
different juggling patterns using a numerical code, now on that beat.
known as a siteswap. Since most juggling patterns repeat themselves at
To understand the siteswap, I invite you to try a some point, it is enough to describe a pattern by listing
thought experiment. Imagine a juggler is standing in the heights of the throws up to the point at which they
front of you and is juggling three balls in a uniform way, repeat. For example, if a juggler throws each ball to a
free of tricks, gimmicks, and flaming torches. Now close height of 3, the pattern 3, 3, 3, 3, . . . would be denoted
your eyes (in your imagination, that is). You will hear by a siteswap of (3). This pattern is shown in figure 1.
a regular sequence of “thuds” (or, beats) as the balls hit The siteswap (b) is called a b-ball cascade pattern and is
the juggler’s hands—left and right in alternation. The one of the most common juggling patterns. Two other
pattern you may be visualizing can be seen, beat by common three-ball patterns are (531) and (441).
beat, in figure 1. Once we have a list of throws, it is possible to con-
Imagine now that you open your eyes and follow the struct an arc diagram in which each beat corresponds
motion of a single ball. Jugglers define the height of a to a dot and the throws are drawn as arcs. Think of
throw as the number of beats that occur between the the arc diagram as a musical score: The arcs and the
time the ball is tossed and the time it lands (including dots tell us what is happening at each moment of
the landing beat itself). Be careful here—this version of time. Figures 2, 3, and 4 show the arc diagrams for the

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Figure 1. Six beats of the three-ball cascade pattern.
Figure 2. An arc diagram for the three-ball cascade pattern (3).
Figure 3. An arc diagram for the siteswap (531). Notice that one
of the balls (in red) is always thrown with height 3, while the
other two alternate between throws of height 5 and 1.
Figure 4. An arc diagram for the siteswap (441).
siteswaps (3), (531), and (441), respectively.
The length or period of a juggling sequence is the
length of the siteswap (so the three previous examples
have lengths 1, 3, and 3, respectively). We need to be
careful, though: Different siteswaps can represent the
same pattern. For example, (531), (315), and (153) all
represent the same repetition of throws.
With the siteswap notation in hand, we can pose
the first major question for the mathematics of jug-
gling: Given a sequence of nonnegative integers, how do
we know if it is a valid juggling siteswap? We should
be more precise here about the word “valid.” While
advanced jugglers can do some amazing tricks, includ-
ing the throwing and catching of multiple balls at the
same time, we assume our imaginary juggler can throw
or catch only one ball at any given beat. When two or
more balls land at the same time, we will call this a
collision. So, we define a siteswap as valid if there are no
collisions.
Two balls will collide if they are thrown at different
times, say, beats i and j, and land at the same time,
say, beat k. The height hi of the ball thrown at time i
is while the other throw has height
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So, in order to guarantee no collisions, we must have
whenever Because the pattern
is periodic, we need only check the n heights in the
siteswap, but to do so we must use arithmetic modulo n.
For example, for the siteswap (413),
is congruent to modulo 3; indeed,
in the juggling sequence 4, 1, 3, 4, 1, 3,…, the third
and fifth tosses collide on the sixth beat. (Draw an arc
diagram to verify this for yourself!) This leads us to a
characterization theorem for valid siteswaps:
Theorem. A sequence of nonnegative integers
is a valid juggling siteswap if the numbers
mod n are distinct for all
With this theorem, it is easy to check if a string of
digits is a valid siteswap. Consider the siteswap (54635).
We simply compute i + hi for each throw and reduce
modulo 5:
Beat: i 1 2 3 4 5
Height: hi 5 4 6 3 5
6 6 9 7 10
mod 5 1 1 4 2 0
Because the first and second numbers are the same
modulo 5, this siteswap is invalid. However, if we change
the 4 to a 1 we obtain the valid siteswap (51635).
Try it! Show that (825) and (41357) are valid siteswaps and
that (4864) is invalid.
This is all well and good, but one crucial question
remains: How many balls are required to juggle a given
valid siteswap? The following theorem allows us to de-
termine, at a glance, the number of balls required.
Theorem. For any valid juggling siteswap, the
average of the throw heights equals the number of balls
required to juggle that siteswap.
For example, (531), (71), (441), and (66661) re-
quire three, four, three, and five balls, respectively.
Additionally, we can use the theorem to quickly identify
some invalid siteswaps: (2463) is not valid because its
average is 3.75.
How do we know that this theorem is true? We can
prove it using a numerical version of the word morphs
game (let’s call it number morphs).
Here are the rules for number morphs: You are given
a siteswap, and you must gradually even it out so that
the heights in the final siteswap are all the same. At
each step, you may interchange any two adjacent num-
bers and then transfer a “unit” of height from the right
digit to the left digit (we’ll call this process a height
swap). For instance, to apply a height swap to the adja-
cent pair 62, switch it to 26 and then transfer a unit of
height from right to left, yielding 35. It is important to
recall that a siteswap represents a periodic sequence, so
the last digit in a siteswap is adjacent to (and to the left
of) the first digit.
In figure 5 we see that a height swap merely switches
the landing times of the two balls in question. So a
height swap can’t create or eliminate a collision. In
particular, a siteswap is valid if, and only if, it is valid
after performing a height swap. Moreover, a height swap
doesn’t change the number of balls in play and it does
not change the average of the heights. Thus, if we win
at number morphs, then the original siteswap is valid
and the average of the heights is the number of balls
required to juggle it.
Try it! Show that if we perform a height swap twice on
any pair of numbers, they return to their original values.
Let’s play the game! The siteswap that we encoun-
tered earlier, (51635), can be morphed in the following
way:
51635
51455
24455
44453
44444
This shows that (51635) is a valid siteswap requiring
four balls.
Try it! Play number morphs with the valid siteswaps (825)
and (41357). Try playing number morphs with the invalid
siteswap (4864).
We still have not finished the proof; to do so we
must show that if a siteswap is valid, then it is pos-
sible to win at number morphs. So, suppose we begin
with a valid siteswap. If we are at a nonwinning stage,
then, because the sequence is periodic, there must be a
maximal height that is followed by one of lower height
Figure 5. Replacing
62 (gray) with 35
(green).
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(for example, 51 in the siteswap (51455)). Moreover, the
larger height is at least two larger than the smaller one,
for otherwise the two balls will collide (in fact, you know
that you will never encounter an adjacent pair
because that would mean the siteswap is invalid, thus
making the original siteswap invalid). Perform a height
swap on this pair. Afterward, either the maximal height
of the new siteswap is one smaller or there is one fewer
of the maximal value. Repeat this procedure. Because
the average of the heights remains unchanged, this
strategy must terminate in a constant sequence. This
gives us a winning strategy for any valid siteswap, thus
completing the proof.
Try it! Now that you have seen some of the mathemati-
cal tricks that lie underneath the juggling tricks, it is time
to juggle. There are exactly three valid siteswaps that have
length two and require three balls: (60), (51), and (42). Try
juggling these. What are the 12 valid siteswaps that have
length three and require three balls? (Hint: six of them
involve at least one throw of height zero.)
FURTHER READING
The most comprehensive resource is Burkard Polster’s
book The Mathematics of Juggling (Springer-Verlag,
2003).
The Juggling Information Service (juggling.org) is
an amazing resource. One important item is Francisco
Alvarez’s book Juggling—Its History and Greatest
Performers (juggling.org/books/alvarez).
You can have a computer generate juggling anima-
tions using siteswaps! A good program is available at
jugglinglab.sourceforge.net.
To read jugglers’ opinions of the mathematics of
juggling see Gregory S. Warrington’s article “Juggling
Performers + Math = ?” in the February 2008 issue of
Math Horizons.
More advanced readers can check out Joe Buhler and
Ron Graham’s chapter, “Juggling Drops and Descents,”
in Mathematical Adventures for Students and Amateurs
(MAA, 2004). ■
Erik Tou teaches computer science at Pacific Lutheran
University in Tacoma, Washington. His research inter-
ests include number theory and the history of mathemat-
ics. He is a co-director of the Euler Archive, and an
author of a recent paper, “A Zeta Function for Juggling
Patterns,” which appeared in the Journal of Number
Theory.
Email: touer@plu.edu
http://dx.doi.org/10.4169/mathhorizons.21.3.5
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