March 26, 2019


04:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Museum-205

The Montana Tech Public Lecture Series presents Wend Werner.

Wend Werner will present The Mathematics of Shuffling Cards, on Tuesday, March 26 at 4 p.m. in Museum-205.

Shuffling a deck of cards seems easy enough. In this talk, analyzing this process from a more theoretical point of view, we will discover that in a finer description of this process some more advanced mathematical techniques must be used, and that not all questions about card shuffling have been answered so far. The mathematical topics that come up here stem from (a more abstract version of) Fourier analysis as applied to random walks on groups, and variants of the (stochastic) central limit theorem. Somewhat surprisingly, we will see that a problem from solidstate physics is very similar in nature.

All lectures are free and open to the public. 

Click on the link to see the full spring 2019 public lecture series speakers and schedule.