Workout notes: am: easy but deliberate 4 mile walk (across the bridge). PM: about 30 minutes with weight machines, dumbbells, planks. This was to “keep the motion”, so to speak.
Today: I attended the 3 hour Math and Sports session and really enjoyed it. Oh yes, I talked too (about NBA free throw shooting streaks).
Later, I made the final talk of the day: it was about recreational math (which has some serious, non-trivial problems and fun interpretations.
Here are some photos and my comments:
Yes, I often buy a book that I’ll end up not having time enough to read.
I do find good food.
Recreational mathematics: how quickly can puzzles be solved?
Yes, the solution is NP complete. My mom bought me one of these.
Yes, checkers IS completely solved..as of recently.
A list of some of the stuff the speaker covered. The art made from straight strings was fascinating.
Sports and math: talk 1. I am intently listening.
Is there a way of seeding a tournament so that no higher seeded team would want to swap places with a lower seeded one?
Ice skating and the mathematics of solving the associated physics problem
Some baseball strategy. Yes, the “new school” works better than the “old school.”
How does one rank teams, especially if there is a tie in record and you have round robin results such as: Illinois 55, Minnesota 31, Minnesota 41, Purdue 10, then Purdue 46, Illinois 7? (yes, this happened in 2018).
So did this: Minnesota 37 Wisconsin 15, Wisconsin 49, Illinois 20 and, well, we’ve been through that.
One method: introduce a new node “oracle” and use eigenvectors of the adjacency matrix of the associated directed graph.
This was my audience for talk no. 3 of the session. I enjoyed myself.
Life of an old goat 