Q&A Persi Diaconis The mathemagician

摘要

Which came first for you, magic or maths? Magic came first. When I was five, I found a magic book in the attic and started doing shows. I was a terrible magician but the other kids liked it. In high school I had a good geometry teacher but had no interest in mathematics and never did homework. When I was 13,1 met Alex Elmsley, a soft-spoken British computer engineer and magician, at a magic shop in New York City. He showed me that eight perfect shuffles would put a deck back in its original order. His ingenious method for moving the top card to a desired position within the deck was my introduction to binary numbers. How did you pursue magic? The sleight-of-hand artist Dai Vernon invited me to Delaware to do some magic shows when I was 14 - and I never went back home. We found crooked gamblers to learn their techniques. There are often tricky probability questions involved. I didn't have much probabilistic intuition and made every boneheaded mistake you could make. During ten years on the road, I learned the hard way.