Sharad Goel

Email: sharadcam.cornell.edu
Research Interests: Theoretical and applied probability.
Office phone: 5-4195
Advisor: Laurent Saloff-Coste

Abstract on my research: The Mathematics of Card Shuffling

I am interested in the question, How many times do you need to shuffle a deck of cards before it is close to random? Intuitively, if you shuffle enough times, the order of the cards shouldn't depend on the initial order of the deck. This intuition was in fact confirmed already in the early twentieth century by Markov and Poincare. But given 52 cards, exactly how many times do you need to shuffle the deck? 10? 100? 1000? This area of research builds on tools and ideas from a number of areas, including probability, algebra, functional analysis, combinatorics, and representation theory.