Recently, I have been reading Sharon Bertsch McGrayne’s book The Theory That Would Not Die. In it, I came across the name of mathematician Persi Diaconis, who she mentions had worked as a professional magician. Always interested in magic, I large collection of rare magic books, I looked him up and discovered that he had done work on the mathematics of card shuffling.
To my surprise, just a few days ago BoingBoing featured a video about Diaconis and his work on cards:
