Joint Colloquium: Persi Diaconis -- Adding Numbers and Shuffling Cards

When numbers are added in the usual way, ’carries’ occur.  These carries turn out to be
a Markov chain with an ’amazing’ transition matrix.  This same matrix occurs in the
usual method of riffle shuffling cards, as the ’Foulkes character table’ for the
symmetric group and and in the analysis of fractals.  I will try to explain all this to
a non specialist audience.  This is joint work with Jason Fulman