Practitioner's Commentary: Card Shuffling

Brad Mann has done an excellent job of explaining various card-shuffling results. That of Bayer and Diaconis is particularly noteworthy because of the wide public recognition it has received [19921. It is not often that mathematicians can prove something significant that is so quickly and widely known. Rather than the regular seventeen-sided polygon that Gauss requested for his monument, Bayer and Diaconis need only the simple phrase, Seven's enough for fifty-two.