 Diaconis received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982.In 1990, he published (with Dave Bayer) a paper entitled "Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to Its Lair" (a term coined by magician Charles Jordan in the early 1900s) which established rigorous results on how many times a deck of playing cards must be riffle shuffled before it can be considered random according to the mathematical measure total variation distance.Diaconis is often cited for the simplified proposition that it takes seven shuffles to randomize a deck.