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"In the bestselling tradition of Freakonomics and Scorecasting comes a clever and accessible look at the fascinating links between physics and football. How is the West Coast Offense like quantum mechanics? How does the shape of the football invoke chaos theory? What lessons did Vince Lombardi glean from the brain of Sir Isaac Newton and the beautiful mind of John Nash? Should the NFL ban helmets? Why, in defiance of mathematics, does a coach almost never go for it on fourth down? The answers to these and dozens of other physics questions determine the outcome of every football game played in America, and--perhaps--the future of the nation's most popular sport. In Newton's Football, journalist and New York Times bestselling author Allen St. John and TED speaker and former Yale engineering professor Ainissa Ramirez look at the peculiar science of America's Game. They show how most fundamental laws of the physical universe can be found at work every Sunday afternoon. From the way a cornerback uses momentum to make a touchdown-saving tackle to the science of a perfect spiral, basic elements of the game demonstrate scientific principles that continue to astound advanced physicists and engineers. With a clear-eyed empirical approach--and an exuberant affection for the game--St. John and Ramirez address topics that have long beguiled scientists and football fans alike, including the odd shape of the ball (or, as they put it, "The Divinely Random Bounce of the Prolate Spheroid") how Teddy Roosevelt saved football using a theory that would later affect robotics and computer animation the brutal science of high-speed impacts how facemasks made the game more dangerous how San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh orchestrated football's Quantum Leap the unexpected problems caused by well-intentioned rules why psychologists would say NFL coaches are like primates when it comes to innovation how a terrible off-the-field injury changed placekicking how the football helmet is effective in staving off injury--and how it is dangerously ineffective The greatest minds in football exhibit an instinctual grasp of science. In an era when the professional game is plagued by ongoing questions regarding traumatic brain injuries, a firmer grasp of the physics behind this fast, violent sport is needed now more than ever. Blending smart reporting, counterintuitive creativity, and compelling narrative, Newton's Football takes gridiron analysis to the next level, giving fans a book that entertains, enlightens, and explains the game anew"-- Provided by publisher.

• Foreword ix Preface xi
• Chapter 1: Mathematics in the Air 1 Royal Hummer 8 Back to Magic 15
• Chapter 2: In Cycles 17 The Magic of de Bruijn Sequences 18 Going Further 25
• Chapter 3: Is This Stuff Actually Good For Anything? 30 Robotic Vision 30 Making Codes 34 To the Core of Our Being 38 This de Bruijn Stuff Is Cool but Can It Get You a Job? 42
• Chapter 4: Universal Cycles 47 Order Matters 47 A Mind-reading Effect 52 Universal Cycles Again 55
• Chapter 5: From the Gilbreath Principle to the Mandelbrot Set 61 The Gilbreath Principle 61 The Mandelbrot Set 72
• Chapter 6: Neat Shuffles 84 A Mind-reading Computer 85 A Look Inside Perfect Shuffles 92 A Look Inside Monge and Milk Shuffles 96 A Look Inside Down-and-Under Shuffles 98 All the Shuffles Are Related 99
• Chapter 7: The Oldest Mathematical Entertainment? 103 The Miracle Divination 105 How Many Magic Tricks Are There? 114
• Chapter 8: Magic in the Book of Changes 119 Introduction to the Book of Changes 121 Using the I Ching for Divination 122 Probability and the Book of Changes 125 Some Magic (Tricks) 127 Probability and the I Ching 136
• Chapter 9: What Goes Up Must Come Down 137 Writing It Down 138 Getting Started in Juggling 145 10 Stars of Mathematical Magic (and some of the best tricks in the book) 153 Alex Elmsley 156 Bob Neale 160 Henry Christ 173 Stewart James 181 Charles Thornton Jordan 189 Bob Hummer 201 Martin Gardner 211
• Chapter 11: Going further 220
• Chapter 12: on secrets 225 Notes 231 Index 239.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Magical Mathematics reveals the secrets of fun-to-perform card tricks--and the profound mathematical ideas behind them--that will astound even the most accomplished magician. Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham provide easy, step-by-step instructions for each trick, explaining how to set up the effect and offering tips on what to say and do while performing it. Each card trick introduces a new mathematical idea, and varying the tricks in turn takes readers to the very threshold of today's mathematical knowledge. Diaconis and Graham tell the stories--and reveal the best tricks--of the eccentric and brilliant inventors of mathematical magic. The book exposes old gambling secrets through the mathematics of shuffling cards, explains the classic street-gambling scam of three-card Monte, traces the history of mathematical magic back to the oldest mathematical trick--and much more.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• 1. Playing the Game
• Mathematics as Applied Puzzle-Solving
• 2. Latin Squares
• What Do Mathematicians Do?
• 3. Greco-Latin Squares
• The Problem of the Thirty-Six Officers
• 4. Counting
• It's Harder Than it Looks
• 5. Equivalence Classes
• The Importance of Being Essentially Identical
• 6. Searching
• The Art of Finding Needles in Haystacks
• 7. Graphs
• Dots, Lines and Sudoku
• 8. Polynomials
• We Finally Found a Use For Algebra
• 9. Extremes
• Sudoku Pushed to its Limits
• 10. Epilogue
• You Can Never Have Too Many Puzzles
• Solutions to Puzzles.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Packed with more than a hundred color illustrations and a wide variety of puzzles and brainteasers, Taking Sudoku Seriously uses this popular craze as the starting point for a fun-filled introduction to higher mathematics. How many Sudoku solution squares are there? What shapes other than three-by-three blocks can serve as acceptable Sudoku regions? What is the fewest number of starting clues a sound Sudoku puzzle can have? Does solving Sudoku require mathematics? Jason Rosenhouse and Laura Taalman show that answering these questions opens the door to a wealth of interesting mathematics. Indeed, they show that Sudoku puzzles and their variants are a gateway into mathematical thinking generally. Among many topics, the authors look at the notion of a Latin square-an object of long-standing interest to mathematicians-of which Sudoku squares are a special case; discuss how one finds interesting Sudoku puzzles; explore the connections between Sudoku, graph theory, and polynomials; and consider Sudoku extremes, including puzzles with the maximal number of vacant regions, with the minimal number of starting clues, and numerous others. The book concludes with a gallery of novel Sudoku variations-just pure solving fun! Most of the puzzles are original to this volume, and all solutions to the puzzles appear in the back of the book or in the text itself. A math book and a puzzle book, Taking Sudoku Seriously will change the way readers look at Sudoku and mathematics, serving both as an introduction to mathematics for puzzle fans and as an exploration of the intricacies of Sudoku for mathematics buffs.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• 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.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This is an eclectic compendium of the essays solicited for the 2010 Mathematics Awareness Month Web page on the theme of 'Mathematics and Sports'. In keeping with the goal of promoting mathematics awareness to a broad audience, all of the articles are accessible to university-level mathematics students and many are accessible to the general public. The book is divided into sections by the kind of sports. The section on American football includes an article that evaluates a method for reducing the advantage of the winner to a coin flip in an NFL overtime game; the section on track and field examines the ultimate limit on how fast a human can run 100 metres; the section on baseball includes an article on the likelihood of streaks; the section on golf has an article that describes the double-pendulum model of a golf swing and an article on modelling Tiger Woods' career.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Adaptive null-move pruning-- extended futility pruning-- efficient interior-node recognition-- index schemes of endgame databases-- knowledgeable endgame databases-- "DarkThought" goes deep-- self-play experiments revisited.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The text presents results of computer-chess research in the areas of selective forward pruning, the efficient application of game-theoretical knowledge, and the behaviour of the search at increasing depths. It shows how to make sophisticated game-tree searchers more scalable at ever higher depths. Throughout the whole book, the high-speed and master-strength chess program, "DarkThought" serves as a realistic test vehicle to conduct numerous experiments at unprecedented search depths. The extensive experimental evaluations provide convincing empirical evidence for the practical usefulness of the presented techniques.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• v. 1. A master's guide to the ultimate game
• v. 2. The way of the moving horse.

• Mathematics and sports (in place of a foreword) What is applied mathematics? Why five sets? (Mathematical modeling of tennis) Those judges! Records! Records! Linear programming and sports Game models Organizing competitions is an operations planning problem Classifications in sports Conclusion.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This unique book presents simple mathematical models of various aspects of sports with applications to sports training and competitions. Requiring only a background in precalculus, it would be suitable as a textbook for courses in mathematical modeling and operations research at the high school or college level Coaches and those who participate in sports will find it interesting as well. The lively writing style and wide range of topics make this book especially appealing.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Man and machine-- computer chess methods-- a new drosophila for AI?.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This book presents a description of developments in computer chess, a rapidly advancing area in artificial intelligence research. It is intended for an upper undergraduate and above level audience in the computer science (artificial intelligence) community. The chapters have been edited to present a uniform terminology and balanced writing style, to make the material understandable to a wider, less specialized audience. The book's primary strengths are the description of the workings of some major chess programs, a review of tree searching methods, discussion of new research ideas, a philosophical discussion of the relationship of computer game playing to artificial intelligence, and the treatment of computer Go, as an important new research area. A complete index and extensive bibliography makes the book a useful reference work.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)