Faculty & Leadership Blog / Research and Practice

Nonstandard Applications of Mathematics to Sports – Professor Cleary

Professor Rick Cleary will speak about “Some Nonstandard Applications of Mathematics to Sports” during a talk March 24th at 7 p.m. at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT.

Richard Cleary

Richard Cleary

“Thanks to the popularity of books like “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis, there has been a great increase in public awareness that statistical analysis has become a vital and accepted tool in sports applications.

We present some examples in which other branches of mathematics that are accessible ot the general public can be used to consider sports related questions.

We will cover some examples including: using probability to model rare events and streaks in sports; some graph theory and operations research to consider a scheduling question: an optimization problem involving a basketball pool; and a suggestion for taking the coin toss out of overtime in the NFL.”

This event, taking place at University Commons, is cosponsored by the Northeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America and the Sacred Heart University Math Department.