As you probably know by now, in the next two weeks we will have visits from three candidates for a tenure-track position in the department, teaching primarily statistics.
Lunch dates are available.
But the most important part of each visit is the Colloquium. The cards do get more and more randomly mixed if a person keeps shuffling more than seven times, but seven shuffles is a transition point, the first time that randomness is close. The past decade has seen a huge amount of research in Markov chains, applied to problems in statistics, physics, computer science, and many other fields. The list can be viewed as a Markov chain and a generalization of a simple card shuffle. Exposure to basic probability at the level of an introductory statistics course would be helpful, but not necessary.