Persi Diaconis was born on January 31, 1945 in New York City. Diaconis left home at age 14 to learn sleight-of-hand magic, touring with the famous magician Dai Vernon. He returned to school at age 24, enrolling in the City College of New York, primarily so that he could learn to read the seminal books of William Feller, An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications. Diaconis graduated with a degree in mathematics in a little over two years, and by 1974 had a PhD in statistics from Harvard.
Diaconis research has produced important results in Markov chains, Bayesian statistics, random walks, and many other areas. Diaconis received a MacArthur Foundation genius award
in 1979.
His exotic, non-academic pursuits as a magician, coupled with his brilliant theoretical work has made Diaconis a larger than life character in the world of probability. To casual students of probability he is best known for his mathematical analysis of riffle-shuffling (showing that seven shuffles suffice to thoroughly randomize a deck).