The purpose of this post is to determine whether basketball teams who choose to employ an offensive strategy that involves predominantly shooting three point shots is stable and optimal. We employ a game-theoretical approach using techniques from dynamical systems theory to show that taking more three point shots to a point where an offensive strategy […]
Category: Mathematics
In many physics and chemistry courses, one is typically taught that heat propagates according to the heat equation, which is a parabolic partial differential equation: , where is the thermal diffusivity and is material dependent. Note also, we are considering the one-dimensional case for simplicity. Now, let be a solution to this problem, which represents […]
Continuing the debate of the value of three-point shooting in today’s NBA, my article analyzing this issue from a mathematical perspective has now been published on the arXiv, check it out!
The purpose of this post is to demonstrate some very beautiful (I think!) mathematics that arises form Darwinian evolutionary theory. It is a real shame that most courses and discussions dealing with evolution never introduce any type of mathematical formalism which is very strange, since at the most fundamental levels, evolution must also be governed by […]
Nowadays, one cannot watch a popular science tv show, read a popular science book, take an astrophysics class without hearing about black holes. The problem is that very few people discuss this topic appropriately. This is further evidenced that these same people also claim that the universe’s expansion is governed by the Friedmann equation as […]
Howard Beck had an interesting article today on Bleacher Report, basically suggesting that the NBA finals, in particular, the current style of play embodied by The Golden State Warriors is somehow a vindication of D’Antoni’s basketball philosophies: “Shoot a lot of threes”, “Shoot in 7 seconds or less”, “Play small lineups”, etc… While the Warriors have […]
The NBA finals are exactly five days away, and I wanted to present an analysis breaking down the matchup between The Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers. I used machine and statistical learning techniques to generate the most probable scenarios for the outcome of each game, and this is what I found. Note that the probabilities […]
It is without question that the greatest team in NBA history was the 1995-1996 Chicago Bulls. They went 72-10 that year and went on to win the NBA Championship against a top-notch Seattle Supersonics team. Phil Jackson’s system and first-class coaching were the major reasons why the Bulls were so good, but I wanted […]
Based on several internal statistical models that my colleagues and I developed, we all have concluded that the Raptors losing the way they did in the first round was somewhat of a statistical anomaly. Through an extensive analysis, I present evidence below that shows it was due to several coaching […]
I am testing out a new algorithm that I have been developing over the past few months that attempts to predict the outcome of sports games, in particular, NBA games. I am taking it out for a “Test Run” today. Here is what I predict: Probabilities in principle are not too difficult to predict assuming […]
Relativity Digest 