Natural Blogarithms

Now there’s an application that a good many sports fans can appreciate. The realm of the mathematician knows no bounds. I came across a couple of very interesting articles that laid down some of the difficult questions in both baseball and football that still need to be answered. Most of the revolve around a specific approach to statistical analysis but they are both quite interesting:

Football’s Hilbert Problems and Baseball’s Hilbert Problems

They are entitled as Hilbert’s problems, not because the relate to any specific research that David Hilbert performed but as a model for their presentation of the problem’s.

David Hilbert was a mathematician who in 1900 delivered the most influential speech in the history of mathematics (Hilbert 1902). He outlined 23 major problems to be studied in the next century, while outlining a philosophy for how mathematics should be studied. In the 2000 edition of Baseball Prospectus, Keith Woolner wrote an essay entitled “Baseball’s Hilbert Problems.”(Kahrl, et al. 2000) Woolner’s essay, in the spirit of Hilbert, listed 23 unanswered questions about baseball. If baseball research is now about where David Hilbert was in 1900, football research is about where the Arabs were when they invented algebra. Analysis in football has a long way to go.

Maybe I’ll tackle a few of these problems over my lunch break tomorrow. What do you think?

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