Playing cards in math

Mathematicians are very strange people. Sometimes it’s very difficult to understand what they really think about what’s happening in the head of these geniuses. For example, take the professor of mathematics and statistics, Percy Dyakonisa (Persi Draconis) from Stanford University, who officially works as a magician.

Percy Deaconess, through his whole life, carried a love of ... cards. Ordinary playing cards. He believes that many mathematical problems can be demonstrated by the example of these very maps. Or even use them to solve problems. For example, he once helped decrypt messages sent by prisoners in a California prison, using small random shuffles to significantly improve the encryption key.

He also analyzed the Bose-Einstein condensate, in which a group of cooled atoms are combined into a single “superat”, representing atoms as sequences of cards that move back and forth. In his opinion, this approach makes the problem more understandable and “friendly”. He says : “Each of us has basic images in which we translate things, and for me these are maps.

The most famous discovery of Deaconess in 1992 was the proof that about seven standard shuffles of the deck are enough for maximum randomization of the position of the cards. Since then, the professor has carefully analyzed all types of shuffling and explained how effective each of them is.

Percy Diaconis fled home at the age of 14. Even then, he dreamed of becoming a magician, but still found a way to go to university and connected his career with mathematics. As it turned out, mathematics is very close to the long-standing attraction of a young man.

At the age of 24, he began to choose special courses to understand how to calculate the probability of occurrence of various combinations of cards. A couple of years later, in his letter of recommendation to the statistics program at Harvard University, another professor wrote that this guy wrote "one of the best programs with tricks for ten cards, so you have to accept it."

Obviously, card tricks and math are very closely related. Professor Percy Diaconis is still working in this area and shows that maps can indeed be used to solve standard mathematical problems.