Table of Contents

Preface; Part I. Baseball: 1. Sabermetrics: the past, the present, and the future Jim Albert; 2. Surprising streaks and playoff parity: probability problems in a sports context Rick Cleary; 3. Did humidifying the baseball decrease the number of homers at Coors Field? Howard Penn; 4. Streaking: finding the probability for a batting streak Stanley Rothman and Quoc Le; Part II. Basketball: 5. Bracketology: how can math help? Tim Chartier, Erich Kreutzer, Amy Langville and Kathryn Pedings; 6. Down 4 with a minute to go G. Edgar Parker; 7. Jump shot mathematics Howard Penn; Part III. Football: 8. How deep is your playbook? Tricia Muldoon Brown and Eric B. Kahn; 9. A look at overtime in the NFL Chris Jones; 10. Extending the Colley method to generate predictive football rankings R. Drew Pasteur; 11. When perfect isn't good enough: retrodictive rankings in college football R. Drew Pasteur; Part IV. Golf: 12. The science of a drive Douglas N. Arnold; 13. Is Tiger Woods a winner? Scott M. Berry; 14. G. H. Hardy's golfing adventure Roland Minton; 15. Tigermetrics Roland Minton; Part V. NASCAR: 16. Can mathematics make a difference? Exploring tire troubles in NASCAR Cheryll E. Crowe; Part VI. Scheduling: 17. Scheduling a tournament Dalibor Froncek; Part VII. Soccer: 18. Bending a soccer ball with math Tim Chartier; Part VIII. Tennis: 19. Teaching mathematics and statistics using tennis Reza Noubary; 20. Percentage play in tennis G. Edgar Parker; Part IX. Track and Field: 21. The effects of altitude in the 400m sprint with various IAAF track geometries Vanessa Alday and Michael Frantz; 22. Mathematical ranking of the Division III Track and Field Conferences Chris Fisette; 23. What is the speed limit for Men's 100 Meter Dash? Reza Noubary; 24. May the best team win: determining the winner of a cross country race Stephen Szydlik; 25. Biomechanics of running and walking Anthony Tongen and Roshna E. Wunderlich.

Promotional Information

An accessible compendium of essays on the broad theme of mathematics and sports.

About the Author

Joseph A. Gallian is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

Reviews

This book was fun to read. … Mathematics and Sports was an interesting and enlightening book that contains a great variety of mathematics, sports, as well as the nature of applications. For teachers of mathematics, there are many useful references to making the ideas presentable to students. …" - Chris Arney, Mathematics and Computer Education