

Persi Diaconis - magician-turned-mathematician (2004) - TriinT
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/june9/diaconis-69.html

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mahmud
Great read!

 _At a friend's suggestion, he bought himself a copy of William Feller's
textbook An Introduction to Probability and Its Applications but couldn't read
it because he didn't know calculus. He was 18 at the time._

..

 _At 24, Diaconis began taking evening math classes at the City College of New
York. He performed magic tricks during the day to pay his way through school._

..

Martin Gardner makes an interesting cameo appearance in this man's life as
well.

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pixcavator
He is also involved in computational topology <http://comptop.stanford.edu/>.

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TriinT
An interesting passage from the article:

 _He still doesn't [own a computer]. He says he got sick of adjusting to new
operating systems and noted, after not using computers for several years, that
"nothing bad happened to me. And I said, 'Well, I could either learn the
current system or learn differential geometry. I think I'll learn differential
geometry this year.'"_

~~~
mhartl
Persi relies on collaborators and students for computer stuff. (I talked with
him about this after a lecture he gave at Caltech. The lecture was on perfect
shuffles, and involved a live demonstration of the technique.)

~~~
TriinT
I assumed he does, indeed, rely on collaborators for computer stuff. After
all, although Diaconis is a former magician, no amount of magic would cause
the papers to write themselves.

In fact, there were two things I liked about this passage: 1) the fact that he
does not use a computer, 2) the fact that he does not know much of
Differential Geometry.

1) makes me wonder if I waste too much time online. 2) makes me feel less bad
for knowing so little of Differential Geometry ;-)

