Perci Diaconis Presented the Inaugural Herman Rubin Memorial Lecture
10-11-2019
The Department of Statistics was pleased to host distinguished professor and mathematician Persi Diaconis as our inaugural speaker for the Herman Rubin Memorial Lecture on Friday, October 11, 2019, in Lawson 1142. An abstract of Professor Diaconis's talk can be found on this page.
Persi Diaconis is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University. He has received many awards, just a few of which are a MacArthur Fellowship (1982), the Rollo Davidson Prize (1982), and election to the National Academy of Sciences (1995). His Erdős number is 1.
Among the areas in which Professor Diaconis has made fundamental contributions are foundations of Bayesian statistics (DeFinetti's Theorem), applications of group theory to probability and statistics, and rates of convergence of Markov chains to their stationary distributions. He is famous for proving (with Dave Bayer) that it takes 7 dovetail shuffles of a new deck of cards to bring it close to randomness.
Professor Diaconis is also a renowned magician and scholar of magic. He is the author (with Ron Graham) of the book Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas that Animate Great Magic Tricks.
More information about Professor Diaconis can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persi_Diaconis
https://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Diaconis.html