The Uniqueness of Card Shuffling

You will never shuffle a deck of cards the same way twice. Ever. Not unlikely.

Not rare. Mathematically absurd. And no — this isn’t magic. It’s math being

obnoxious. The reason is factorials. A factorial means multiplying a number by every number

below it. For cards, that’s 52 factorial: 52 times 51 times 50…

all the way down to 1. The result? About eight followed by sixty-seven zeros.

That’s more possible card orders than seconds since the universe existed. So yes —

you almost certainly just created a deck order no one has ever seen. Math is rude like

that.