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Photograph by Joe
Schmelzer
Allen Knutson, a
mathematician at
the University of
California at
Berkeley, keeps
five balls aloft in
an intricate pattern.
Knutson often
juggles in class to
demonstrate the
basic premise of
discrete
mathematics: One
input (or throw)
will inevitably
yield one output (or
falling ball).
FROM THE DECEMBER 2004 ISSUE
The Mathematics of . . . Juggling
An algebra whiz reveals the secrets of keeping a lot of balls in the air
By Bill Donahue | Friday, December 03, 2004
RELATED TAGS: MATH
Allen Knutsons office is a mess. Theres a unicycle with a
flat tire in the corner, and a Bongo Board beside that, and a
bunch of stuffed lizards crawling amid heaps of papers and
books. The computer monitor is face down and unplugged on
the desk. But Knutson, a 35-year-old tenured mathematics
professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is
completely focused on the challenge at hand. Long-haired,
bearded, and wispy, with a quiet, otherworldly presence, he
coolly recites a number sequence while juggling four balls in
the air: 6-6-1-5-1-5-6-6-1-5-1-5-6-6-1-5-1-5 . . .
Knutson is an authority on algebraic combinatorics, which
involves, among other things, the counting of intersecting
lines in multidimensional spaces. The number sequence hes
uttering would be familiar to anyone who knows siteswap, a
mathematical language that describes juggling routines.
Siteswap codifies motion by assigning each throw a number.
A 3 is a throw that goes about chin high and stays aloft for
roughly three beats of time; most novices toss ever-repeating
3s while learning to juggle three balls. A 6 is an over-the-
head toss that stays in the air about twice as long as a 3, and
so on. Odd-number throws are passed from one hand to
another. Evens are both tossed and caught by the same hand.
A 2 is a held ball, and a 0 denotes an empty hand.
An infinite number of sequences are possible, but the system
is nonetheless orderly andat least in its simplest form
governed by an ironclad law: No matter what the tempo, a
jugglers hand can make only one throw at a time. This means
that the average of the numbers in a given throwing sequence
must always be equal to the number of balls being thrown: 5-
5-5-1 is unmistakably a four-ball pattern.
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The beauty of siteswap is that it enables jugglers to write down and tinker with
routines. A bland routine, in which three balls move back and forth between the
right and left hands at exactly the same height, can be swapped for a sequence like
a 4-4-1, in which two balls yo-yo straight up and down, staying aloft for four beats
each, as a third ball is thrown from one hand to the other at waist level.
The system is so elegant, mathematically, and so beautifully spare in its notation
that there is now a small cult of siteswapping numbers jugglers, a geeky, largely
male group of computer programmers, academics, and engineers who eschew
razzle-dazzle trickschain-saw juggling, for instancein favor of such sublime
challenges as keeping 10 balls aloft. Ron Graham, once the chief scientist for
AT&T, is a siteswapper, as is a good portion of the math faculty at Reed College
in Portland, Oregon. Siteswap even occasionally yields papers such as Juggling
and Applications to q-Analogues, published in Discrete Mathematics a few years
ago.
Allen Knutson became one with the cult in 1987, as a freshman at what may be
jugglings premier strongholdCaltech in Pasadena. He was a Dungeons &
Dragons devotee then and a video game aficionado who reveled in complex, rapid-
fire keyboard maneuvers. (You dont have time for anything except direct
computation, he explains.) He found the same sort of Zen bliss in juggling. The
calibrated hand work transported him beyond emotion, to a point of mental
clarity, he says. He practiced an hour a day and soon became world class. In 1990
Knutson and a friend, Caltech physics major Dave Morton, juggled 12 balls
together, establishing a world passing record that was not surpassed for five years
(see box at the bottom of page 2).
Knutson can still do seven balls by himself, but he is semiretired from juggling
now. He keeps 20 or so glittery balls in his desk drawer, partly to show students
how to digest complex sets of numbers. His approach is always low tech. While
many jugglers rely on computer programs that generate possible throw sequences,
such programs tend to propose a slew of aesthetically dull sequences. Knutson
prefers to start with nothing but hunches, scratching out little rows of numbers with
arrows that describe the balls orbits. When pondering the five-ball 3-4-5-6-7
pattern, for instance, he can determine that the first throw, a 3, will land three beats
later, as the 6 is being thrown:

3-4-5-6-7
The 4 will stay aloft for four beats, landing as the second 3 is being thrown:
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3-4-5-6-7-3
The 5 will float for five beats and land as the next 5 goes airborne:
3-4-5-6-7-3-4-5
In about five seconds, Knutson can see that the 3, 6, 7, and 4 spin in a single orbit,
while the 5always landing back on itselfdoes its own lonesome, solipsistic
dance amid the fray.
JUGGLING BY THE NUMBERS
Graphic by Matt Zhang
Siteswappers assign a number to each throw in a juggling
routine. The higher the number, the higher the throw. Odd-
numbered throws are passed from hand to hand, and even-
numbered throws stay in the same hand. You could even do
a throw of 1, Allen Knutson muses. It would go backward
in time and become antimatter.
In swapping sites, jugglers mutate orbits and follow a simple rule: You can
increase the height of one throw in a sequence so long as you equally decrease the
height of another throw that lands laterand also pay heed to how much later it
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The world record for
passing juggling balls was
set by Americans Joey
Cousin and Bruce Sarafian,
who kept 13 balls aloft for
54 catches in 1995 and for
176 catches in 1997.
Sarafian also holds the
record for the most balls
occurs. If its one throw away, you can add one to the height. In other words, the 4-
4-1 mentioned above could be further mutated into a 5-3-1, wherein one ball does
an incessant 3 while the other two fly through a 5-1 orbit.
Sometimes, for kicks, siteswappers devise what Knutson calls jugglers-only tricks,
improbable sequences whose difficulty is obvious only to the cognoscenti.
Knutsons proudest invention is a five-ball trick, 8-5-7-4-1, that forces the juggler
to throw lofty 8s from each hand while continually changing gears to make a wide
variety of lesser throws in rapid succession. I came up with that one to annoy
Bruce Tiemann, Knutson gloats, alluding to a Caltech grad whom many consider
the worlds top numbers juggler. He said, Oh, I can do that, and then, after a
couple of hours, he gave up in frustration.
By now, Knutson has exhausted most of the possible juggling sequences. Either I
have them down, or theyre simply beyond me, he says. Theyre eight- or nine-
ball patternsthings I cant do. So last fall, along with a Berkeley undergrad
named Peter Dolan, he began to consider randomness in juggling.
Pure randomness occurs when a hypothetical juggler is equally likely to make a
throw that stays aloft for one, two, three, four, or five beats. Knutson and Dolan
want to know what happens when a random juggling pattern becomes increasingly
predictable. Is there a mathematical freezing point between randomness and
predictability, like the phase transition that separates a liquid from a solid?
As they work, Knutson and Dolan are evolving a parameter, q, that denotes where
a juggling sequence lies on the continuum between randomness and predictability.
If they find, for instance, that juggling routines freeze when q is 32, then
computerized juggling programs should be able to use the parameter to weed out
what Knutson calls silly and boring sequences and focus only on the most
delightful. Knutsons freezing point has a magical aura for siteswapperslike
musicians, they yearn for a happy medium between rote predictability and random
arm stabbingand he and Dolan believe theyve almost found it. The point were
seeking does exist, Knutson says.
Mathematicians just need to look a
little further. A good theorem, he adds,
is like a good juggling routine: It
holds together. It makes sense, and it
also delivers pleasant surprises.
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juggled by one person: 10.
He once had a car with a
Florida license plate that
read 11-BALLS.
1 of 2
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