Who came up with this brilliant idea?
Rachel Bishop. 
That's me. I'm amazing.
You can e-mail me at mathemagician@comcast.net.
That's what the first draft of this page said. I intended to change it, but everyone who saw thought it was funny. So now I have decided to leave it. I will elaborate though...
I have a degree in math. For my senior project I studied what happens to numbers when you double them or square them in a mod. It was very inductive work. I tried doubling numbers in various mods and I looked for patterns. Each pattern I found would only explain part of what I was seeing. I would then go to my teacher and say "Ok, now I understand this part, but the rest makes no sense, I don't think there is a pattern." She just told me "that's what you said last time, keep looking." So I looked again until I came to understand another layer of the pattern.
At the end of the term I presented my project. A friend of mine, who studied perfect shuffles, was also presenting her senior project. She showed us pictures of perfect shuffles in which she had colored the various groups of numbers that move together. This is when I got the idea of making a scarf based on this pattern. She went on to talk about patters she observed of the color groups in various size perfect shuffles. I realized that the pattern she observed was the same one that I had been studying. As you have no doubt learned from the What's going on with the math? page, the path a card takes as it travels through the perfect shuffles is to double in a mod. Just the same problem I had approached in a different way for my project. I wrote up a whole paper about it in which I describe in much more detail my discoveries about how this math works. If you would like to read it, here it is: Senior Project in Mathematics.pdf Then when you finish please e-mail me and let me know. The only people to enjoy it so far are me and my math teacher.
So now it is a couple years later I have finally gotten around to actually knitting the perfect shuffle scarves I envisioned. I have always wanted to have a website but until now I never felt like I had a unique contribution to make to the internet. But no one else seems to have a website about knitting perfect shuffle scarves. I may even be the only person who has ever done it. So here I am. Please feel free to e-mail me. I would be happy to hear your feed back.
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What is a perfect shuffle anyway?
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What's going on with the math?
Knit your own perfect shuffle scarf.
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