#48: House of Cards

Okay, where are our math lovers out there? You’ll love this one-in-a-million fact shared by a fellow math nerd! Their post marveled at the fact that when you shuffle a deck of cards, you’re creating a sequence of the cards in the deck that has never existed before. Because of probability, the combination you create by shuffling will most likely never happen again. 

How can this be possible? It’s all about the numbers! There are 52 cards in a deck and practically endless permutations of all 52 cards. Think of it this way. To create a sequence, there are 52 ways to pick the first card. Then there are 51 ways, then 50 ways, going all the way down to the last card. If you do the math (to be honest, we can’t so we let other people do it), the different possible sequences of cards is a huge number with thousands of zeros in it. Math is wild.