BY GERRY TRITZ

PHOTOS BY BRIAN THORPE

 

For many comedian-jugglers at the Fargo IJA festival last summer, it was a source of fresh material, an inside joke that became a running gag by the end of the week. But for Ed Carstens, a shy, unassuming 24-year-old graduate student, "site swaps" were much more than jokes.

 

Combining two of his favorite hobbies, juggling and math, has established Carstens as a pioneer in a field hailed by those who understand it and mocked by many who don't. He is most notable as the inventor of JugglePro, a personal computer program that uses mathematical models to generate an infinite number of juggling patterns and show them in simulated 3-D with various colored balls. Carstens started writing the program about two years ago in Turbo Pascal, and tries to update it twice a year.

 

He credits math wiz Jack Boyce for creating JugglePro's program "generator," an algorithm that results in an infinite num­ber of site swap patterns. JugglePro sells for $20 on disk, plus $5 for each new version. It can also be downloaded for a test drive from Moocow, the FTP site at the Univerisity of Indiana that serves as the home computer for rec.juggling, the Internet juggling interest group.