Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service,

with a programme that brings the stats out of Stasis and takes the numbness out of numbers,

and I'm Tim Halford. This week we're going to tell you what unites magic,

the Second World War, and Covid-19 testing. So let's start with the magic.

And I don't know if it's not that kind of magic. Mathematical magic.

That's better. With me is our Head of Department and actual magician, Hugh Levinson. Hello, Hugh.

Thanks so much. Thank you, Tim. It's great to be back on the programme. I'm going to try and

read your mind. And what I want you to do is I want you to think of a number. And quite a small

number, say up to about, I know, 60, 63. And I'd say maybe a number, it could be a birthday,

the date of a birthday or somebody special close to you, could be two digits from your pin number,

in which case I'll move them around and turn around. But think of something that's got a kind of

deep emotional meaning to you. My pin number, you reckon, has that? I'm sure it has a very deep

emotional resonance. And there'll already be letters because people will point out it's actually a pin,

not a pin number. A pin, you do sorry, your pin. That's pin. No, it's fine. Okay, now I'm thinking of

a number that is neither a birthday nor a pin, but that has an emotional resonance. That's super.

Now I've got six cards here with a whole load of numbers on them. Oh gosh. Okay, what I want you to do

is look through and see which of these has your number on. Right. It's like there's quite a lot of

numbers on them. There's like 20 or 30 numbers on each one. They seem to be pretty random. I'm

searching for my number. Okay, might it be on several of them? It might be. Okay, right.

Okay, I've gone through, I think it's on three of them and it's missing from three of them.

So the three you've got are the ones that you think it's on. Yes. Okay, so if you like to put those

down there between us and then reading deep into your soul, there's something that is deeply

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