Math is truly magical

Mathematics is, for many, confusing, difficult and very, very dry.

But there was a professor visiting the University of Minnesota on Wednesday who says math is magical, literally magical.

If you called Stanford University Mathematics Professor Persi Diaconis a genius, you'd be right.

He ran away from home at age 14 and he never finished high school.

"I learned about mathematics through card tricks. My first three grades in calculus were C, C and D."

Yet he still got accepted to Harvard. How? By inventing a perfect shuffle magic card trick in which all four aces turn up, every time.

KARE 11's Roxane Battle was amazed, "How did you do that? Years of practice and self denial," laughed Diaconis.

A huge dose of mathematic probability also figured into the invention, "Suppose you wanted to make some combination of shuffles so that you got the aces in a five-handed game or a three-handed game. Could you do it? That's a math problem."

So, says Diaconis, is a basic coin toss.

Professor Diaconis just finished two years of research to determine that a coin will come up the same way it started 51 percent of the time. You're hitting the coin at the same place with the same force. Coin tossing is physics. It's not random."

And he, adds, it's fun, "It's related to the real world."

By Roxane Battle, KARE 11 News

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