Persi Diaconis's unlikely scholarly career in mathematics began with a disappearing act.
He was 14 years old and obsessed with magic, spending much of his free time in or around Tannen's Magic Store, on Times Square, where sleight-of-hand masters regularly gathered to show off tricks and to gossip. There, one of the most influential magicians of the past century, a card maestro named Dai Vernon, saw Diaconis's prodigious trick dealing and invited the young man to leave New York and join him on the road.
Diaconis vanished from his regular life, dropping out of school and cutting ties with his family. "I packed a little bag—I took some decks of cards and some socks," remembers Diaconis, now 66 with unruly tufts of white hair, in his office at Stanford University, where he is a professor of mathematics and statistics. "I was sort of his assistant." And his student. Vernon, then in his 60s, promised that if his apprentice advanced far enough in his studies, he would reveal secrets of magic he had never shared with anyone else.
It was this search for the hidden workings of magic that led Diaconis to math. During a few years on the road doing his own magic act, he came to think of the hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs in a deck of cards as variables that followed predictable formulas as he shuffled them. He could code the cards as binary numbers in his head and perform mental calculations as audience members cut the deck, so that when they picked a card, any card, Diaconis could name it.
This month the magician-turned-mathematician reveals some secrets in a new book, Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks (Princeton University Press). The unusual work is part math textbook, part magic primer, and part history book, tracing how magic and math have long traveled under the same cape. 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.
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