Persi Diaconis
Template:Short description Template:Infobox scientist Persi Warren Diaconis (Template:IPAc-en; born January 31, 1945) is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Diaconis Graham 2011</ref> He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
He is particularly known for tackling mathematical problems involving randomness and randomization, such as coin flipping and shuffling playing cards.
Biography
[edit]Diaconis left home at 14<ref>Lifelong debunker takes on arbiter of neutral choices</ref> to travel with sleight-of-hand legend Dai Vernon, and was awarded a high school diploma based on grades given to him by his teachers after dropping out of George Washington High School.<ref>Amason, Cassidy. "Deterministic And Probabilistic Approaches To Card Shuffling", Georgia College & State University, November 30, 2016. Accessed February 14, 2023. "Diaconis attended George Washington High School in NYC and found himself at home as a member of the magic club.... Regardless of not being in high school, Diaconis’ teachers decided to give him grades for exams he had not taken - and he ended up graduating high school."</ref> He returned to school at age 24 to learn math, motivated to read William Feller's famous two-volume treatise on probability theory, An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications. He attended the City College of New York 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.<ref name="che">Jeffrey R. Young, "The Magical Mind of Persi Diaconis" Chronicle of Higher Education October 16, 2011 [1]</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 and bottom deal".<ref>Interview with Martin Gardner, Notices of the AMS, June/July 2005.</ref>
Diaconis is married to Stanford statistics professor Susan Holmes.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Career
[edit]Diaconis received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982. In 1990, he published (with Dave Bayer) a paper entitled "Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to Its Lair"<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> (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 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).<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
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 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.<ref name=science_news>Template:Cite magazine</ref><ref name=persi_at_stanford>Template:Cite journal</ref>
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."<ref>Keating, Shane. How a magician-mathematician revealed a casino loophole, BBC, 20 October 2022.</ref>
He served on the Mathematical Sciences jury of the Infosys Prize in 2011 and 2012.
Recognition
[edit]- 1982 – Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship
- 1982 – Awarded the Rollo Davidson Prize
- 1990 – Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
- 1995 – Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
- 1997 – Gibbs Lecturer, American Mathematical Society<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
- 1998 – Plenary Speaker of the ICM<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
- 2003 – Received an Honorary D. Sci. from the University of Chicago<ref>Template:Cite book. Cf. p.224</ref>
- 2005 – Elected to the American Philosophical Society<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
- 2006 – Awarded the Van Wijngaarden Award
- 2012 – Awarded the Levi L. Conant Prize<ref name="Kehoe2012">Template:Cite journal</ref>
- 2012 – Fellow of the American Mathematical Society<ref>List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2012-11-10</ref>
- 2013 – Received an Honorary Degree from the University of St Andrews<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
- 2014 – Recipient of Cahit Arf Lecture by Middle East Technical University
Works
[edit]The books written or coauthored by Diaconis include:
- Group Representations In Probability And Statistics (Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 1988)<ref>Review of Group Representations In Probability And Statistics:
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- Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks (with Ronald L. Graham, Princeton University Press, 2012),<ref>Reviews of Magical Mathematics:
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- Ten Great Ideas about Chance (with Brian Skyrms, Princeton University Press, 2018)<ref>Reviews of Ten Great Ideas about Chance:
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His other publications include:
- "Theories of data analysis: from magical thinking through classical statistics", in Template:Cite book
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See also
[edit]References
[edit]External links
[edit]- Interview: Persi Diaconis discusses his life, magic and mathematics on the 7th Avenue Project radio show
- Template:MathGenealogy
Template:John von Neumann Lecturers Template:Authority control
- 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
- American probability theorists
- American magicians
- American statisticians
- Harvard University alumni
- Stanford University Department of Mathematics faculty
- Stanford University Department of Statistics 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
- George Washington Educational Campus alumni