Nearly 500 years after it was written, a manual on magic and the power of numbers written by Leonardo Da Vinci's best friend and teacher, Franciscan monk Luca Pacioli, has finally been translated into English.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the world's oldest magic text, De Viribus Quantitatis (On the Powers of Numbers), was written in Italian by da Vinci's roommate Pacioli between 1496 and 1508 and contains the first ever reference to card tricks as well as guidance on how to juggle, eat fire and make coins dance.

It is also the first work to note that da Vinci was left-handed....

"Sources of magic methods go back at least to the first century, but this book teaches not only the methods but also gives a glimpse into how one might perform them with an eye to entertaining an audience.

"The book was rediscovered after David Singmaster, a mathematician, came across a reference to it in a 19th-century manuscript. "It's the foundation not only of modern magic but of numerical puzzles, too," he said.Tricks in the magic text include how to write a sentence on the petals of a rose, wash your hands in molten lead, and make an egg walk across a table ("commoners will consider it a miracle"). The book contains some of the first known European examples of numerical puzzles, which are similar to those printed in today's newspapers, such as Sudoku.