Diaconis left home at 14 to travel with sleight-of-hand legend Dai Vernon, and was awarded a high school diploma based on grades given to him by his teachers after dropping out of George Washington High School. He returned to school at age 24 to learn math, motivated to read William Feller's famous two-volume treatise.
Diaconis has coauthored several more recent papers expanding on his 1992 results and relating the problem of shuffling cards to other problems in mathematics. Among other things, they showed that the separation distance of an ordered blackjack deck (that is, aces on top, followed by 2's, followed by 3's, etc.) drops below .5 after 7 shuffles. Separation distance is an upper bound for variation distance.
Diaconis has been hired by casino executives to search for subtle flaws in their automatic card shuffling machines. Diaconis soon found some and the horrified executives responded, "We are not pleased with your conclusions but we believe them and that's what we hired you for."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persi_Diaconis