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- Counting in the dark
There is an amusing story about Dirac’s visit to Calcutta. He arrived with his wife, and Bose went with some of his students to meet them at the railway station. After alighting from the train, they were taken to Bose’s car and ushered into the back seat while Bose and his students crowded into the front seat. When Dirac, one of the founders of Fermi–Dirac statistics, politely invited some students to come to the back seat, Bose quipped, “We believe in Bose statistics.” - How a magician-mathematician revealed a casino loophole
The perfect shuffle has been used by gamblers and magicians for centuries because it gives the illusion of randomly shuffling the cards. But it is far from random. In fact, if you perform the same sequence of perfect shuffles eight times in a row, the deck will magically restore its original order. - Mysterious Patient in Room 23
“By all appearances, she was just another Jane Doe the hospital was required to take in — needing care that would probably take about a week. But in the next day or two, a family lawyer, following a tip from the manager of the woman’s building, identified the “unknown.” She was the Baroness Birgit Thyssen-Bornemisza, 80 years old, from one of Europe’s wealthiest families, with businesses in banking, steel, and other industries, and one of the world’s premier private art collections.”