Persi diaconis biography of williams
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The boy who fascinated play a part Magic became a Mathematician.
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Diaconis, Persi (1945–)
Persi Diaconis was born on January 31, 1945 in New York City. Diaconis left home at age 14 to learn sleight-of-hand magic, touring with the famous magician Dai Vernon. He returned to school at age 24, enrolling in the City College of New York, primarily so that he could learn to read the seminal books of William Feller, An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications. Diaconis graduated with a degree in mathematics in a little over two years, and by 1974 had a PhD in statistics from Harvard.
Diaconis research has produced important results in Markov chains, Bayesian statistics, random walks, and many other areas. Diaconis received a MacArthur Foundation in 1979.
His exotic, non-academic pursuits as a magician, coupled with his brilliant theoretical work has made Diaconis a larger than life character in the world of probability. To casual students of probability he is best known for his mathematical analysis of riffle-shuffling (showing that seven shuffles suffice to thoroughly randomize a deck).
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Persi Diaconis
American mathematician and statistician
Persi Warren Diaconis (; born January 31, 1945) is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician.[2][3] He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University.[4][5]
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[6] 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.[7] 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.[8]
According to Martin Gardner, at school, Diaconis supported himself by playing poker on ships between New York