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Persi Diaconis at Stanford (Summer 2004).

Persi W. Diaconis (born January 31, 1945) is an American mathematician and former professional magician. He is Mary V. Sunseri professor of statistics and professor of 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 achieved brief national fame when he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1979, and again in 1992 after the publication (with D. Bayer) of a paper entitled "Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to its Lair" (a term coined by magician Charles Jordan in the early 1900's) which established rigorous results on how many times a deck of playing cards must be shuffled before it can be considered "random enough." Diaconis established that the deck gradually increases in randomness until seven shuffles, then suddenly becomes much more random. Seven shuffles, for reasons made precise in the paper, is what casinos should use.

Diaconis is a colorful character. He left home at 14 [1] to travel with sleight-of-hand legend Dai Vernon, and dropped out of high school, promising himself that he would return one day so that he learn all of the math necessary to read William Feller's famous two-volume treatise on probability theory, entitled An Introduction To Probability Theory and its Applications. He returned to school, learned Feller, and became a great mathematical probabilist.

• Group representations in probability and statistics, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Hayward, CA, 1988. vi+198 pp. ISBN 0-940600-14-5.
• "Theories of data analysis: from magical thinking through classical statistics", in Hoaglin, D.C et al. (eds) (1985). Exploring Data Tables Trends and Shapes. Wiley. ISBN 0-471-09776-4. 
• D. Bayer and P. Diaconis (1992), "Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to its Lair", Annals of Applied Probability, volume 2, page 294–313.
• "Statistical problems in ESP research", Science, 201, p.131-136

• Freedman-Diaconis rule
• Patience sorting
• Shuffle
• Random walk

• Personal web site
• Profile from Indiana University
• Persi Diaconis at the Mathematics Genealogy Project