Persi Diaconis
| Persi Diaconis | |
|---|---|
Persi Diaconis, 2010
|
|
| Born |
January 31, 1945 New York City, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions |
Harvard University Stanford University |
| Alma mater |
City College of New York B.S. (1971) |
| Doctoral advisor |
Dennis Arnold Hejhal Frederick Mosteller |
| Doctoral students |
Sourav Chatterjee Igor Pak Robin Pemantle Eric Rains Jeff Rosenthal Arif Zaman |
City College of New York B.S. (1971)
Persi Warren Diaconis (born January 31, 1945) is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician. 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 and shuffling playing cards.
Professor Diaconis received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982. In 1992, 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 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. Interestingly, 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).
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