Professor Persi Diaconis
Persi Diaconis, Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University, will deliver a lecture-demonstration entitled “From Magic to Mathematics and Back” at 4 p.m. on Thursday, November 5th in Room B102 of Van Vleck Hall, 480 Lincoln Drive on the UW-Madison campus.
Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius Grant”) in 1979, Diaconis has done outstanding work in probability, statistics, and combinatorics. He is particularly known for tackling mathematical problems involving randomness and randomization, such as coin flipping and shuffling playing cards.
He will illustrate his lecture with magic tricks that fool magicians, discuss how these tricks depend on hidden mathematics, and demonstrate how the math behind the tricks has applications to secret codes, decoding DNA, robot vision and many other subjects.
Part of the Hilldale Lecture series, this event is free and open to the public.
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I’d be there if I could … I hear he does a wonderful show and lecture.