Playing cards in mathematics

Mathematics - very strange people. Sometimes it is very difficult to understand what they really think, what's going on in the mind of these geniuses. For example, take a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Percy Dyakonisa (Persi Draconis) from Stanford University, who officially works like a magician.

Percy Dyakonis through all life has carried by love ... cards. Ordinary playing cards. He believes that many mathematical problems can be illustrated by these same cards. Or even use them to solve problems. For example, he once helped to decipher the messages exchanged between the prisoners one of California's prisons, using small random shuffle to significantly improve the encryption key.



He also analyzed the Bose-Einstein condensate, in which a group of cold atoms are combined into a single "superatom", representing atoms as a sequence of cards that move back and forth. In his opinion, such a campaign makes the problem more understandable and "friendly". He говорит: "Each of us have a basic image in which we translate things, and for me this card.

The most famous discovery Dyakonisa in 1992 was доказательство, that it is enough for about seven standard shuffles the deck for maximum randomization situation cards. Since then, Professor carefully analyzed all kinds of shuffling and explained how effective each of them.

Percy Dyakonis ran away from home at the age of 14 years. Even then he dreamed of becoming a magician, but still found a way to go to university and tied his career with mathematics. As it turned out, math is very close to the long-standing attraction boys.

At 24, he began to choose specific courses in order to understand how to calculate the probability of different combinations of cards. After a couple of years in his letter of recommendation for the program statistics at Harvard University wrote another professor that this guy wrote "one of the best programs with stunts for ten cards, so you have to accept it».

Obviously, the card tricks and mathematics are very closely related. Professor Percy Dyakonis still working in this field and shows that the card really can be used for standard mathematical problems.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/249238/