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Persi Diaconis was born in New York on January 31, 1945. Upon receiving a Ph. D. from Harvard in 1974 he was appointed Assistant Professor at Stanford. Following periods as Professor at Harvard (1987-1997) and Cornell (1996-1998), he has been Professor in the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford since 1998. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a past President of the IMS and has received honorary doctorates from Chicago and four other universities. The following conversation took place at his office and at Aldous's home in early 2012.

Simulation is one of the most commonly used techniques to gain information about complicated systems, but the term “simulation” is used to convey many different meanings. For probabilists simulation means “imitating randomness” and the term “Monte Carlo simulation” is sometimes used to emphasize this when we talk to outsiders. The main use of simulation is to approximate quantities that are difficult to compute exactly. The object of interest in simulation does not necessarily have anything to do with randomness itself. A more modern and useful example is Monte Carlo integration, which is a way to use random numbers to compute the area under a curve. An important use of simulation is to evaluate new and complex statistical techniques. Persi Diaconis, the magician turned probabilist, has been interested in the randomness of dice but has concluded that this is far more difficult than coin tosses or card shuffles.

\"This result shocked casinos and bridge players because they had mostly been shuffling many fewer times,\" [Julie Rehmeyer] reports. \"Even drug manufacturers were interested. Mixing two drugs together into a single pill, it turns out, is a bit like shuffling cards.\"

Dr. Bradley Efron, a statistician at Stanford University, said coincidences arise ''all the time'' in statistical work. When researchers find clusters of odd cancers or birth defects or other diseases, statisticians are asked ''to decide which events are the luck of the draw'' and which may reflect some underlying cause, Dr. Efron said. ''That's what [Persi Diaconis] and Fred are trying to unravel,'' he added. ''I think it's a very interesting enterprise.'' Dr. Diaconis and Dr. [Frederick Mosteller] said they decided to study coincidences because they were fascinated by the role these odd events play in everyone's lives. ''All of us feel that our lives are driven by coincidences,'' Dr. Diaconis said. ''Who we live with and where we work, why we do the things we do often rest on slim coincidences.'' These chance events ''touch us very deeply,'' he said. The two statisticians defined a coincidence as ''a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.'' ''I have a friend who said, 'My daughter, myself, and my husband all have a birthday on the 11th of a month,' '' Dr. Diaconis recalled. ''O.K., there are 30 categories, 30 days of the month. How many birthdays do we have to know so that three are on the same day of the month?'' The answer, he calculated, is 18. ''So if you know 18 people, it's even odds that three will be born on the same day of the month,'' he explained. So the friend's birthday coincidence, he said, ''is not so unusual.''

Answer: Surprise! A coin toss isn't \"fair\" at all. It took some deep digging by Stanford statistician -- and former magician -- Persi Diaconis, but after working with other mathematicians (including his wife) and technicians who constructed a mechanical- coin-tosser, Diaconis uncovered that a coin will come up heads 51 per cent of the time if the heads starts out on top, and vice versa. Magician Diaconis is himself capable of flipping coins and getting them to come up either heads or tails 10 out of 10 times. Here he is careful to make the coin appear to turn over many times, but it really doesn't. The fact is, says Diaconis, that even when the coin is flipped with the intent of unloosing a \"fair\" toss, this is not humanly possible. Bias is going to creep in, and out the window inevitably will go 50-50. Aerophones have their sound generated by vibrating columns of air within, such as brass, reeds, woodwinds; chordophones include stringed and some keyboard instruments; idiophones generate sound with the instrument body itself, such as bells, the triangle; membranophones are drums, tambourines, etc; the newcomer electrophones add synthesizers, electric guitars and the like.

Answer: Surprise! A coin toss isn't \"fair\" at all. It took some deep digging by Stanford statistician -- and former magician -- Persi Diaconis, but after working with other mathematicians (including his wife) and technicians who constructed a mechanical- coin-tosser, Diaconis uncovered that a coin will come up heads 51% of the time if the heads start out on top, and vice versa. Magician Diaconis is himself capable of flipping coins and getting them to come up either heads or tails 10 out of 10 times. Here he is careful to make the coin appear to turn over many times, but it really doesn't. The fact is, says Diaconis, that even when the coin is flipped with the intent of unloosing a \"fair\" toss, this is not humanly possible. Bias is going to creep in, and out the window inevitably will go 50-50.

The secret behind one of the mathematical tricks that Persi Diaconis, of Stanford University, developed for his magic act is presented.

Persi Diaconis, a mathematician and statistician at Harvard University, co-authored the discovery with Dave Bayer, a mathematician and computer scientist at Columbia University, Diaconis, who is also a magician, has invented numerous card tricks and has been carefully watching casino dealers and casual card players shuffle for the past 20 years. The usual shuffling produces a card order that \"is far from random,\" Diaconis said. \"Most people shuffle cards three or four times. Five times is considered excessive.\"

As a statistician and friend of Harvard Professor Persi Diaconis, I read with interest the editorial page \"laurel\" given to Diaconis and his colleague David Bayer for their research showing that seven shuffles are required to make random a deck of playing cards (Jan. 13).

This month Persi Diaconis, the magician-turned-mathematician, reveals some secrets in a new book, Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks. Diaconis wrote the book with a colleague, Ron Graham, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California at San Diego, who once worked as a professional juggler and trampoline acrobat.