[drifkin]

Persi Diaconis is fascinating, it's definitely worth reading through his biography [1].

A small preview: after leaving high school at 14 to travel as a magician, a little more than a decade later he managed to get into grad school at Harvard, largely due to a letter of recommendation about his magic abilities (apparently that's a thing).

I also really enjoyed that he was shy revealing his background in magic to other Stanford faculty until he discovered that Paul Lévy also studied perfect shuffling [2].

[1]: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Diaconis...

[2]: https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Magical-Mind-of-Persi/...