The 2019-20 Serge Lang Undergraduate Lecture will be given on Friday, November 22, 2019 at 4:10-5 PM in room 60 Evans Hall on the Berkeley campus. Our lecturer this year is Persi Diaconis.
MUSA and the Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, present
The 2019-20 Serge Lang Undergraduate Lecture
Persi Diaconis
Stanford University
Adding numbers and shuffling cards
Abstract: When numbers are added in the usual way, 'carries' appear along the way. It turns out that the carries form a Markov chain with an 'amazing' transition matrix. Strangely, this same matrix appears in the analysis of the usual way of shuffling cards (the seven shuffles theorem). I will explain all this 'in English'.