Credit: CC0 Public Domain There are pitchers in Major League Baseball (MLB) who have had 30-year careers, but as UC Riverside demographer David Swanson points out, these are extreme outliers and often the stars of the game who receive most of the media’s attention. The reality for most pitchers in baseball is that their professional…
Credit: CC0 Public Domain Around the middle of the 2015 season, something odd started happening in Major League Baseball (MLB): Home runs surged. They surged again in 2016, from the previous year’s 4,909 to 5,610, and then again in 2017 to an all-time high of 6,105. What was going on? For a stats-mad sport, the…
It was a bittersweet triumph. Their model had been validated in the real world. Share prices of Wayfair—which had billed itself as “the Amazon of furniture”—had fallen 23 percent over one day after the company announced a fourth-quarter loss. Wayfair’s model was broken—and Daniel McCarthy’s model, created with Wharton marketing professor Pete Fader, identified the…
He has been called “Stanford’s star of statistical inference,” and he is responsible for creating a swathe of modern statistics, including the bootstrap. But when Brad Efron first heard about a project to tackle the horrific prevalence of rape in Nairobi’s poorest schools, his first thought was that it required more than statistical help—it required…
In my puzzle blog earlier today I set you the following three challenges: 1) The King of the Mountains went up the col at 15 km an hour and down it at 45 km an hour. It took him two hours in total. Assuming that the distance he travelled up and down are the same,…
Bonjour guzzleurs, As we are almost midway through the Tour de France, I thought it would be a good moment for some bicycle puzzles. 1) The King of the Mountains went up the col at 15 km an hour and down it at 45 km an hour. It took him two hours in total. Assuming…
My friend Richard Maunder, who has died aged 80, was distinguished in two separate scholarly disciplines: mathematics and musicology. His book, Algebraic Topology, first published in 1970, became a well-established textbook, and when his interests turned more fully to music he created a new version of Mozart’s Requiem that was controversial but led scholars and…
Hi guzzlers We use numbers every day to describe the world – distances, weights, speeds, debts, populations, and so on. Yet most of us struggle to have an intuitive sense of what these numbers mean. How big is big? How fast is fast? Today I’ve set a different challenge to my usual mathematical puzzle. The…
The tricky math behind your bus route. Credit: Monkey Business Images/shutterstock.com Have you ever waited for your bus at a bus stop for a very long time – only to be greeted by two or more buses arriving together? This phenomenon, known as “bus bunching,” is a problem that bus transit systems around the world…
Phase trajectories for a social system in a conflict situation without external interference. Credit: Lobachevsky University A team of researchers led by Associate Professor Alexander Petukhov of the Institute of International Relations and World History at Lobachevsky University is developing social conflict models on the basis of nonlinear dynamics. For mathematical modeling, an important feature…