Another Conversation with Persi Diaconis

Abstract

Persi Diaconis was born in New York on January 31, 1945. Upon receiving a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1974 he was appointed Assistant Professor at Stanford. Following periods as Professor at Harvard (1987-1997) and Cornell (1996-1998), he has been Professor in the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford since 1998. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a past President of the IMS and has received honorary doctorates from Chicago and four other universities. The following conversation took place at his office and at Aldous's home in early 2012.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-STS404 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A Conversation with David J. Aldous

“…Persi continued working with random walks on groups-see the delightful short monograph (Diaconis, 1988)-as well as the "strong stationary time" methodology appearing in the joint papers you mentioned. You can read his own account in Aldous (2013a).…”