Fans of the two football teams who face off in the Super Bowl will no doubt spend the weekend filled with nervous anticipation – hopeful that their team will emerge victorious, but certain of the knowledge that there can only be one champion. For the rest of us, we must hang our heads with relative degrees . . . → Read More: Are the 49ers skilled, or just lucky?
|
|||||
 Subscribe to this site's RSS feed.  |
Continuing with last week’s theme, and since we are in the midst of playoffs, I’d like to take a moment now to discuss another link between baseball and mathematics. This link is particularly timely since the scuttlebutt on the internet suggests that next year the playoff rules for baseball will be changed: the number of teams . . . → Read More: Playoff Probabilities This weekend, mathematics played a supporting role to Brad Pitt in one of fall’s first critical darlings, Moneyball. Based on the Michael Lewis book of the same name, the film profiles the Oakland A’s during their 2002 bid for World Series glory. What allegedly separates their story from the story of other teams during that . . . → Read More: Moneyball A couple of weeks ago I noticed this article on the Yahoo Sports page, which highlighted a statistically rare event that occurred in the American League on Sunday, May 8th. On that day, 7 baseball games were played on the AL schedule, and in all of those games one team scored exactly 5 runs. The post . . . → Read More: Scoreboard Stats Now that the World Series is upon is, I thought I might take a moment to discuss the latest results in the field of optimal base running. On the face of it, this may seem like a non-issue; after all, as any decent student of geometry will tell you, the shortest distance between any two plates . . . → Read More: Optimal Base Running If you went to the movies in Los Angeles this summer, you may have seen the following ad from Stand Up to Cancer, a charitable program whose telethon aired last Friday night. A clear homage to MasterCard‘s long-running Priceless campaign, this ad swaps out prices for odds, ending with the sobering fact that 1 . . . → Read More: Stand Up to Questionable Odds As summer reaches its midpoint, we come to the end of another rousing year of World Cup soccer. As with any international sporting event, fans all over the world have undoubtedly had their share of ups and downs. Of all the countries in this year’s tournament, however, I think Germany may be receiving the most attention, . . . → Read More: Let’s Make a Deal with Paul the Octopus As April comes and goes, so too does Mathematics Awareness Month. Every year, the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics swirls mathematics with a different delightful discipline: last year it was climate, and the year before was voting. This year’s theme is mathematics and sports, a topic which has inspired a number of articles . . . → Read More: Mathematics Awareness Month 2010 In the aftermath of the Super Bowl, some of you fans may be dreading the next six months. To kick off this football drought, I’d like to highlight this article, which was featured on Yahoo yesterday. The article says that Saints quarterback Drew Brees should hope to lose the coin toss at the start of the . . . → Read More: Lying with Statistics in Football This is the third in a series of posts about pools used for betting on the outcome of football games (part one can be found here, and part two here). Let me briefly recall the setting, which is probably familiar to anyone who has been to a Super Bowl party. Typically, one bets on the outcome . . . → Read More: Football Pools, Part 3 |
||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Math Goes Pop! - All Rights Reserved |
|||||
