Mathematics

It's playoff time in baseball and the Giants have home field advantage over the Texas Rangers starting tomorrow, October 27th. Baseball, more so than any other sport, lends itself to numerical…

President Obama's director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, made no friends among women when, as president of Harvard, he tried to have a discourse about gender differences in…

Yesterday, I posted Game Theory's El Farol Bar problem, with a couple questions. (If you haven't read it yet, go back—the answer's no good without the puzzle.) And the truth is there's no answer, or…

Think you're no good at Chess?   Not a strategic thinker?   You're better at it than you may think. When we make any decisions related to how we think someone else will act,  we must…

Everyone loves the El Farol Bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico (especially W. Brian Arthur, who wrote this puzzle in 1994). That is, everyone loves the El Farol as long as it's not too crowded. If it's less…

Israel’s national lottery is all over the news these days because the same numbers (13, 14, 26, 32, 33, and 36) came up twice during one month. A journalist called an expert on gambling, Z. Gilula, a…

A numerical model can't help you finish a marathon, that will take a lot of running, but math can at least help you be the most efficient your body can be. The best part about the night before a…

Benoit Mandelbrot died on 14 October 2010 in a hospice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 85. His name is synonymous with the study of fractals, a term he himself coined in the 1970s.…

Yesterday I posted how Game Theory solves the date-night dilemma: opera or the football game. Actually, I posted the problem but not the solution. For all of you who scratched your heads on Saturday…

Can't decide between the opera and a football game? (If needed, replace these bland stereotypes with specifics from your own relationship). Game Theory's got your back. Imagine the possible outcomes…