Persi Warren Diaconis (; born January 31, 1945) is an American
mathematician of
Greek descent and former professional
magician
Magician or The Magician may refer to:
Performers
* A practitioner of magic (supernatural)
* A practitioner of magic (illusion)
* Magician (fantasy), a character in a fictional fantasy context
Entertainment
Books
* ''The Magician'', an 18th-ce ...
. He is the
Mary V. Sunseri Professor of
Statistics and
Mathematics at
Stanford University.
He is particularly known for tackling mathematical problems involving
randomness and
randomization, such as
coin flipping
Coin flipping, coin tossing, or heads or tails is the practice of throwing a coin in the air and checking which side is showing when it lands, in order to choose between two alternatives, heads or tails, sometimes used to resolve a dispute betw ...
and
shuffling playing cards
Shuffling is a procedure used to randomize a deck of playing cards to provide an element of chance in card games. Shuffling is often followed by a cut, to help ensure that the shuffler has not manipulated the outcome.
__TOC__
Techniques
Overh ...
.
Biography
Diaconis left home at 14 to travel with
sleight-of-hand
Sleight of hand (also known as prestidigitation or ''legerdemain'' ()) refers to fine motor skills when used by performing artists in different art forms to entertain or manipulate. It is closely associated with close-up magic, card magic, card ...
legend
Dai Vernon, and dropped out of high school, returning to school at age 24 to learn math, motivated to read
William Feller
William "Vilim" Feller (July 7, 1906 – January 14, 1970), born Vilibald Srećko Feller, was a Croatian-American mathematician specializing in probability theory.
Early life and education
Feller was born in Zagreb to Ida Oemichen-Perc, a C ...
's famous two-volume treatise on probability theory, ''An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications''. He attended the
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York (also known as the City College of New York, or simply City College or CCNY) is a public university within the City University of New York (CUNY) system in New York City. Founded in 1847, Cit ...
for his undergraduate work, graduating in 1971, and then obtained a Ph.D. in Mathematical Statistics from
Harvard University in 1974), learned to read Feller, and became a mathematical probabilist.
[Jeffrey R. Young, "The Magical Mind of Persi Diaconis" ''Chronicle of Higher Education'' October 16, 201]
/ref>
According to Martin Gardner, at school, Diaconis supported himself by playing poker on ships between New York and South America. Gardner recalls that Diaconis had "fantastic second deal
The second (symbol: s) is the unit of time in the International System of Units (SI), historically defined as of a day – this factor derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes and finally to 60 seconds each ...
and bottom deal".
Diaconis is married to Stanford statistics professor Susan Holmes.
Career
Diaconis received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982. In 1990, he published (with Dave Bayer) a paper entitled "Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to Its Lair" (a term coined by magician Charles Jordan in the early 1900s) which established rigorous results on how many times a deck of playing cards must be riffle shuffled before it can be considered random according to the mathematical measure total variation distance. Diaconis is often cited for the simplified proposition that it takes seven shuffles to randomize a deck. More precisely, Diaconis showed that, in the Gilbert–Shannon–Reeds model In the mathematics of shuffling playing cards, the Gilbert–Shannon–Reeds model is a probability distribution on riffle shuffle permutations that has been reported to be a good match for experimentally observed outcomes of human shuffling, and th ...
of how likely it is that a riffle results in a particular riffle shuffle permutation, it takes 5 riffles before the total variation distance of a 52-card deck begins to drop significantly from the maximum value of 1.0, and 7 riffles before it drops below 0.5 very quickly (a threshold phenomenon), after which it is reduced by a factor of 2 every shuffle. When entropy is viewed as the probabilistic distance, riffle shuffling seems to take less time to mix, and the threshold phenomenon goes away (because the entropy function is subadditive).
Diaconis has coauthored several more recent papers expanding on his 1992 results and relating the problem of shuffling cards to other problems in mathematics. Among other things, they showed that the separation distance of an ordered blackjack
Blackjack (formerly Black Jack and Vingt-Un) is a casino banking game. The most widely played casino banking game in the world, it uses decks of 52 cards and descends from a global family of casino banking games known as Twenty-One. This fam ...
deck (that is, aces on top, followed by 2's, followed by 3's, etc.) drops below .5 after 7 shuffles. Separation distance is an upper bound for variation distance.
Diaconis has been hired by casino executives to search for subtle flaws in their automatic card shuffling machines. Diaconis soon found some and the horrified executives responded, "We are not pleased with your conclusions but we believe them and that's what we hired you for."
He served on the Mathematical Sciences jury of the Infosys Prize in 2011 and 2012.
Recognition
*1982 – Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship
*1982 – Awarded the Rollo Davidson Prize
*1990 – Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM)
*1995 – Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
*1997 – Gibbs Lecturer, American Mathematical Society
*1998 – Plenary Speaker of the ICM
*2003 – Received an honorary D. Sci. degree from the University of Chicago.
*2005 – Elected to the American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
*2006 – Awarded the Van Wijngaarden Award
*2012 – Awarded the Levi L. Conant Prize
*2012 – Fellow of the American Mathematical Society
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...
*2013 – Received an Honorary Degree from the University of St Andrews
(Aien aristeuein)
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Ancient university
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.
*2014 – Recipient of Cahit Arf Lecture by Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
Works
The books written or coauthored by Diaconis include:
* ''Group Representations In Probability And Statistics'' (Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 1988)
* ''Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks'' (with Ronald L. Graham, Princeton University Press, 2012), winner of the 2013 Euler Book Prize
* ''Ten Great Ideas about Chance'' (with Brian Skyrms
Brian Skyrms (born 1938) is an American philosopher, Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and Economics at the University of California, Irvine, and a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He has worked on problem ...
, Princeton University Press, 2018)[Reviews of ''Ten Great Ideas about Chance'':
*
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*
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*
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His other publications include:
*"Theories of data analysis: from magical thinking through classical statistics", in
*
See also
*Freedman–Diaconis rule In statistics, the Freedman–Diaconis rule can be used to select the width of the bins to be used in a histogram. It is named after David A. Freedman and Persi Diaconis.
For a set of empirical measurements sampled from some probability distri ...
*Patience sorting
In computer science, patience sorting is a sorting algorithm inspired by, and named after, the card game patience. A variant of the algorithm efficiently computes the length of a longest increasing subsequence in a given array.
Overview
The algo ...
* Random walk
* Mathemagician
References
External links
Interview: Persi Diaconis discusses his life, magic and mathematics on the 7th Avenue Project radio show
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Diaconis, Persi
1945 births
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Living people
MacArthur Fellows
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
Mathematics popularizers
Probability theorists
American magicians
American statisticians
Harvard University alumni
Stanford University Department of Mathematics faculty
Scientists at Bell Labs
Presidents of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
American people of Greek descent
City College of New York alumni
Members of the American Philosophical Society
Cornell University faculty
Jewish scientists