The first thing to note is that just by looking at Basketball-Reference.com there are 62 factors that uniquely classify a team: MP FG FGA FG% 3P 3PA 3P% 2P 2PA 2P% FT FTA FT% ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV PF PTS OMP OFG OFGA OFG% O3P O3PA O3P% O2P O2PA O2P% OFT OFTA […]
The 2015-2016 NBA season is dawning upon us, and as usual, ESPN has been doing their usual #NBArank, where they are ranking players based on the following non-rigorous methodology: We asked, “Which player will be better in 2015-16?” To decide, voters had to consider both the quality and quantity of each player’s contributions to his […]
Tomorrow is the date of the Canadian Federal Elections. Here are my predictions for the outcome: That is, I predict the Liberals will win, with the NDP trailing very far behind either party.
Even though this posting is a bit different than my usual ones and is outside the scope of this blog, I thought that as a Sikh myself, I have stayed too silent on several issues with regards to the Sikh community, and certain principles of the Sikh religion, that are seemingly unknown to those both […]
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 […]
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 […]