The Minnesota Daily profiles Persi Diaconis' use of magic to teach math; or math to learn magic tricks.
Either way, it involves magic so it makes our pages. (It is also featured on our sister site, Inside Mathematics – which received its 100th hit last week after only two years in existence).
Here was the Stanford Professor's first effect:
Persi Diaconis tossed a sealed deck of cards into an overflowing audience Wednesday night in a Willey Hall auditorium. He asked the man who caught it to cut the deck and pass it along the row while each person took a card.
Then Diaconis told each person which card they had picked — and he was right.
Dr. Diaconis did not use a Svengali or Peek deck. No, he used something far more exotic – math.
But does he know how to do the seven piles of cards spread all over the table trick?
Nope.
“When somebody says they’re going to do a math-magic trick, it sounds as if they’re going to deal cards in piles, and you’ll all fall asleep,” Diaconis said. “I try to develop tricks that are good tricks that don’t look like math, but that have real math hidden in them.”
The profs at the University of Minnesota know Dr. Diaconis for his research in statistics and probability as well as his magic skills.
"He has brought a lot of insight into the way randomness works," one Minnesota professor noted. "People think it's easy, but it's not."
Quinlan's Inside Magic has long been on record as standing for the proposition that randomness is not easy.
Continue reading Math and Magic Equal Sum Fun
The press continues for David Blaine and his career of "not doing magic." The web site 
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