Della Pietra Lecture Series Presents Persi Diaconis (Stanford), March 24-26, 2026

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The Della Pietra Lecture Series is pleased to present a series of lectures by Persi Diaconis (Stanford)

All talks will be streamed live at scgp.stonybrook.edu/live

General Public Lecture 

Tuesday, March 24
Lecture at 4:00pm, Della Pietra Family Auditorium – 103
Wine and cheese reception, 3:30pm, Simons Center lobby

Title:  UNDERSTANDING COINCIDENCES
Abstract: Coincidences astound us. They can affect where we live (and with whom), work and all sorts of things. I will review ideas of Freud and Jung on the psychology of coincidences. I will also show that sometimes, a bit of thought shows ‘it’s not so surprising after all’. A small set of tools and examples lead to a checklist and ways of quantifying things. This is a math talk, but aimed at a very general audience.

This talk is designed for a general audience.

Special Talk for High School and Undergraduate Students 

Wednesday, March 25, at 11:00am in Della Pietra Family Auditorium – 103

Title: THE SEARCH FOR RANDOMNESS
Abstract: I will review some of our most primitive notions of random phenomena; flipping a coin, shuffling cards and throwing a dart at the wall. Thinking about things, we can show that usually we are lazy and things are not at all random. Physics and mathematics and just plain common sense come in. This is a math talk aimed at an undergraduate audience–it has lots of stories (and you can also go make money in a casino).

This talk is designed for high-school students, and will leave plenty of time for questions and discussion with the audience.

Technical Talk for Faculty and Advanced Graduate Students

Thursday, March 26, at 2:00pm in SCGP room 102

Title: RANDOM WALK ON THE RANDOM GRAPH
Abstract: Pick a random graph on n points by flipping a fair coin for each possible edge. Now do it again, independently. What’s the chance the two graphs you get are isomorphic? Small? How small? When n= 100, less than 10^(-1300). Now, let n = infinity. Pick two graphs at random. the chance that they are isomorphic is one (!). this is THE random graph. I will illustrate its strange properties by studying random walk. This is a typical problem of probability in the presence of a random geometry. I will introduce ‘Hardy’s inequalities’ for trees to get where we need to go. This is joint work with Sourav Chatterjee and Laurent Miclo.

Persi Diaconis is a mathematician and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University. He is particularly known for tackling mathematical problems involving randomness and randomization, such as coin flipping and shuffling playing cards.