When Diaconis first came to Stanford, he planned to keep his magic background a secret from his academic colleagues.. fearing they wouldn't take seriously a man of hocus-pocus who did research on card shuffling.
Then he stumbled upon a book that described an experiment by the French mathematician Paul Lévy, analyzing the phenomenon known as perfect shuffling - in which a standard deck of cards is carefully shuffled eight times and ends up returning precisely to its starting arrangement. Diaconis says. "I thought, If Paul Lévy can study perfect shuffling, I can say I study perfect shuffling. So I wrote up my work on perfect shuffling, and it got on the front page of The New York Times."
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