Related papers: The hardest-hit home run?
We present a quantitative analysis of throwing ability for major league outfielders and catchers. We use detailed game event data to tabulate success and failure events in outfielder and catcher throwing opportunities. We attribute a run…
Track and field world records have risen and fallen throughout the history of the sport. A recent rash of record-breaking performances has prompted the question: "How good can we get?". This article offers a review of several attempts to…
A classic problem of the motion of a projectile thrown at an angle to the horizon is studied. Air resistance force and Magnus force are taken into account with the use of the quadratic laws. We consider the asymptotic motion of the…
The game of Othello is one of the world's most complex and popular games that has yet to be computationally solved. Othello has roughly ten octodecillion (10 to the 58th power) possible game records and ten octillion (10 to the 28th power)…
The ball-constrained weighted maximin dispersion problem $(\rm P_{ball})$ is to find a point in an $n$-dimensional Euclidean ball such that the minimum of the weighted Euclidean distance from given $m$ points is maximized. We propose a new…
Many university texts on Mechanics deal with the problem of the effect of the air drag force, using as example the slowing down of a parachute. Hardly no one discuss what happens when the drag force is proportional to both $u$ and $u^2$. In…
Recent measurement technologies enable us to analyze baseball at higher levels. There are, however, still many unclear points around the pitching strategy. The two elements make it difficult to measure the effect of pitching strategy.…
In this paper we study the following problems: given a finite number of nonempty closed subsets of a normed space, find a ball with the smallest radius that encloses all of the sets, and find a ball with the smallest radius that intersects…
We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…
A basketball bounced on a stiff surface produces a characteristic loud thump, followed by high-pitched ringing. Describing the ball as an inextensible but flexible membrane containing compressed air, I formulate an approximate theory of the…
The debate surrounding the hot hand in the NBA has been ongoing for many years. However, many of the previous works on this theme has focused on only the very next sequential shot attempt, often on very select players. This work looks in…
In July 1925 Heisenberg published a paper [Z. Phys. 33, 879-893 (1925)] which ended the period of `the Old Quantum Theory' and ushered in the new era of Quantum Mechanics. This epoch-making paper is generally regarded as being difficult to…
In 1970, Statistics giant, Bradley Efron, amazed the world by coming up with a set of four dice, let's call them A,B,C,D, whose faces are marked with [0,0,4,4,4,4], [3,3,3,3,3,3],[2,2,2,2,6,6],[1,1,1,5,5,5] respectively, where die A beats…
Assessment of the performance of a player in any sport is very much needed to determine the ranking of players and make a solid team with the best players. Besides these, fans, journalists, sports persons, and sports councils often analyse…
In this paper the problem of maximizing the distance to a given fixed point over an intersection of balls is considered. It is known that this problem is NP complete in the general case, since any subset sum problem can be solved upon…
The standard mathematical approach to fourth-down decision making in American football is to make the decision that maximizes estimated win probability. Win probability estimates arise from machine learning models fit from historical data.…
In a letter to Born, Einstein wrote: "Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the old one. I, at…
Angular momentum is taught in every classical mechanics course. It is a difficult topic with misconceptions commonly forming significant barriers to student success. My intention in writing this paper is to combat some of the most common…
Magnitude is an invariant of metric spaces with origins in category theory. Using potential theoretic methods, Barcel\'o and Carbery gave an algorithm for calculating the magnitude of any odd dimensional ball in Euclidean space, and they…
To an adult, it's obvious that the day of someone's death is not precisely determined by the day of birth, but it's a very different story for a child. When the third named author was four years old he asked his father, the fifth named…