Siteswap Ben’s Benjamin Beever (
[email protected]) AD2000 Writings on juggling, for: 1) Jugglers 2) Mathematicians 3) Other curious people ABOUT THE BOOK The scientific understanding of ‘air-juggling’ has improved dramatically over the last 2 decades. This book aims to bring the reader right up to the forefront of current knowledge (or pretty close anyway). There are 3 kinds of people who might be reading this (see cover). As far as possible, I wanted to cater for everyone in the same book. Maybe this would help jugglers to appreciate maths, mathematicians to get into juggling, or even non-juggling, non-mathematicians to develop a favourable perception of the juggling game. In order to fulfil this ambition, I have indicated which parts of the text are aimed at a specific kind of reader. Different fonts have been used to indicate the main intended audience. Everyone (with many exceptions) should be able to understand most of the writings for the curious. However, non-jugglers may not be able to envisage the patterns discussed in the jugglers text, and non-mathematicians may find some of the concepts in the technical sections hard to get their grey matter around. I must point out however, that juggling is a fairly complicated business. It can be very hard to understand what’s going on in a juggling pattern when it’s being juggled in front of you, and it’s not always easy to understand on paper. This book introduces ‘Generalised siteswap’ (GS) notation, and shows how most air-juggling patterns can be formalised within the GS framework.