Mathematics and Magic Tricks
A public lecture
Persi Diaconis,
Stanford University
Tuesday, April 25, 2006 at 7pm
Stata Center - Kirsch Auditorium, MIT
32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA
Persi Diaconis, a leading mathematician and statistician, and recipient of the MacArthur Award, will discuss how the way a magic trick works is sometimes even more amazing than the trick itself. This can be illustrated with a good trick whose working illuminates cryptography, reading DNA strings, robot vision and rhyming patterns in Indian music. The mathematics involves finite fields and the trick leads to the edges of what is known.
Diaconis has an unusual career path -- he left high school at age 14 to go on the road as a magician. Ten years later he enrolled in evening math classes at City College, New York. At age 26 he was accepted for graduate study in mathematics at Harvard University, partly on the strength of a recommendation of Martin Gardner extolling the fact that Diaconis had created two of the ten best card tricks ever invented. After holding various positions at Stanford, Harvard, and Cornell, Diaconis joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1998 as Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics. In the course of his long career he has debunked numerous exploits of psychics and is an expert on card shuffling.
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