Washington University in St. Louis will soon transition to a new dining partnership for the Bear's Den, Danforth University Center, the Village Café, concessions and catering.
By ESTHER LANDHUIS
Persi Diaconis has spent much of his life turning scams inside out. In 1962, the then 17-year-old sought to stymie a Caribbean casino that was allegedly using shaved dice to boost house odds in games of chance. In the mid-1970s, the upstart statistician exposed some key problems in ESP research and debunked a handful of famed psychics. Now a Stanford professor of mathematics and statistics, Diaconis has turned his attention toward simpler phenomena: determining whether coin flipping is random. Could a simple coin toss used routinely to decide which team gets the ball, for instance actually be rigged?