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The existence of "Hot Hands" and "Streaks" in sports and gambling is hotly debated, but there is no uncertainty about the recent batting-average of the New York Times: it is now two-for-two in mangling and misunderstanding elementary…
Constructing a suitable schedule for sports competitions is a crucial issue in sports scheduling. The round-robin tournament is a competition adopted in many professional sports. For most round-robin tournaments, it is considered…
We present a new problem called the incomplete Traveling Tournament problem, which introduces the well known Traveling Tournament Problem into the realm of incomplete round-robin tournaments. We focus on the case where teams can face each…
We introduce and investigate the computational complexity of a novel physical problem known as the Pinball Wizard problem. It involves an idealized pinball moving through a maze composed of one-way gates (outswing doors), plane walls,…
This is the text of an expository talk given at the May 1997 Detroit meeting of the American Mathematical Society. It is a tale of a famous football player and a subtle problem he posed about the uniform convergence of Dirichlet series.…
We show that computing the strongest polynomial invariant for single-path loops with polynomial assignments is at least as hard as the Skolem problem, a famous problem whose decidability has been open for almost a century. While the…
In Major League Baseball, strategy and planning are major factors in determining the outcome of a game. Previous studies have aided this by building machine learning models for predicting the winning team of any given game. We extend this…
Cricket, "a Gentleman's Game", is a prominent sport rising worldwide. Due to the rising competitiveness of the sport, players and team management have become more professional with their approach. Prior studies predicted individual…
A classic problem of the motion of a point mass (projectile) thrown at an angle to the horizon is reviewed. The air drag force is taken into account with the drag factor assumed to be constant. Analytic approach is used for investigation.…
We consider a competition between $d+1$ players, and aim to identify the "most exciting game'' of this kind. This is translated, mathematically, into a stochastic optimization problem over martingales that live on the $d$-dimensional…
We consider all matches played by professional tennis players between 1968 and 2010, and, on the basis of this data set, construct a directed and weighted network of contacts. The resulting graph shows complex features, typical of many real…
Since the advent of high-resolution pitch tracking data (PITCHf/x), many in the sabermetrics community have attempted to quantify a Major League Baseball catcher's ability to "frame" a pitch (i.e. increase the chance that a pitch is called…
This is a write-up of a lecture at the level of a physics colloquium. There exists an idealized mathematical formulation of strong interactions which has no free parameters but is known to describe the real world quite accurately. Over the…
We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…
The infield shift has been increasingly used as a defensive strategy in baseball in recent years. Along with the upward trend in its usage, the notoriety of the shift has grown, as it is believed to be responsible for the recent decline in…
A classic problem of the motion of a projectile thrown at an angle to the horizon in a medium with a quadratic resistance law is studied. An approximate analytical solution of the equations of projectile motion is presented, which has a…
We have developed a sophisticated statistical model for predicting the hitting performance of Major League baseball players. The Bayesian paradigm provides a principled method for balancing past performance with crucial covariates, such as…
Cricket is unarguably one of the most popular sports in the world. Predicting the outcome of a cricket match has become a fundamental problem as we are advancing in the field of machine learning. Multiple researchers have tried to predict…
While magnetic monopoles have extensive theoretical justification for their existence, but have proved elusive to observe, ball lightning is both relatively frequently observed and largely unexplained theoretically. It was first proposed in…
A classic problem of the motion of a projectile thrown at an angle to the horizon is studied. Air resistance force is taken into account with the use of the quadratic resistance law. The action of the wind is also taken into account, which…