Great read!<p><i>At a friend's suggestion, he bought himself a copy of William Feller's textbook An Introduction to Probability and Its Applications but couldn't read it because he didn't know calculus. He was 18 at the time.</i><p>..<p><i>At 24, Diaconis began taking evening math classes at the City College of New York. He performed magic tricks during the day to pay his way through school.</i><p>..<p>Martin Gardner makes an interesting cameo appearance in this man's life as well.
An interesting passage from the article:<p><i>He still doesn't [own a computer]. He says he got sick of adjusting to new operating systems and noted, after not using computers for several years, that "nothing bad happened to me. And I said, 'Well, I could either learn the current system or learn differential geometry. I think I'll learn differential geometry this year.'"</i>