Rate My Professor Persi Diaconis

Persi Diaconis is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University. He earned a B.S. in Mathematics from the City College of New York in 1971, an M.A. in Mathematical Statistics from Harvard University in 1972, and a Ph.D. in Mathematical Statistics from Harvard University in 1974. Diaconis began his career as Assistant Professor of Statistics at Stanford University (1974–1979), followed by Associate Professor (1979–1980) and Professor of Statistics (1981–1987). He subsequently served as George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University (1987–1997) and David Duncan Professor in the Departments of Mathematics and Operations Research and Industrial Engineering at Cornell University (1996–1998). Since 1998, he has held his current positions at Stanford, with additional visiting appointments at institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Cornell University, and Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis (2006–2007).

Diaconis is a mathematician and statistician working in probability, combinatorics, and group theory, with a focus on applications to statistics and scientific computing and a specialty in rates of convergence of Markov chains. He has received numerous honors, including the MacArthur Fellowship (1982–1987), Rollo Davidson Prize (1981), Levi L. Conant Prize (2012), Euler Prize (2012), and honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago (2003), Université Paul Sabatier Toulouse (2003), Uppsala University (2005), Queen Mary University of London (2007), Athens University of Economics and Business (2009), and University of St Andrews (2013). He delivered the Plenary Address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin (1998), served as President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1997–1998), and has been on editorial boards for Annals of Probability, Advances in Applied Mathematics, and SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. Notable publications include 'Group Representations in Probability and Statistics' (1988), 'Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas that Animate Great Magic Tricks' (2011), 'The Mathematics of Shuffling Cards' (2023, with Jason Fulman), and recent papers such as 'Double coset Markov chains' (2023) and 'Poisson approximation for large permutation groups' (2025).