Football's Hilbert Problems
-
Aaron Schatz
David Hilbert was a mathematician who in 1900 delivered the most influential speech in the history of mathematics (Hilbert 1902). He outlined 23 major problems to be studied in the next century, while outlining a philosophy for how mathematics should be studied. In the 2000 edition of Baseball Prospectus, Keith Woolner wrote an essay entitled "Baseball's Hilbert Problems."(Kahrl, et al. 2000) Woolner's essay, in the spirit of Hilbert, listed 23 unanswered questions about baseball. If baseball research is now about where David Hilbert was in 1900, football research is about where the Arabs were when they invented algebra. Analysis in football has a long way to go. The football Hilbert Problems do not merely consist of questions that need to be answered. They start with problems collecting the data that would help answer those questions.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Letter from the Editor
- A First Step
- Practitioner's Comment
- Football's Hilbert Problems
- Article
- Hybrid Paired Comparison Analysis, with Applications to the Ranking of College Football Teams
- A Procedure for Prediction of Sports Records
- Determinants of Success in the Olympic Decathlon: Some Statistical Evidence
- Book Review
- Scientific Football 2005 (by KC Joyner)
Articles in the same Issue
- Letter from the Editor
- A First Step
- Practitioner's Comment
- Football's Hilbert Problems
- Article
- Hybrid Paired Comparison Analysis, with Applications to the Ranking of College Football Teams
- A Procedure for Prediction of Sports Records
- Determinants of Success in the Olympic Decathlon: Some Statistical Evidence
- Book Review
- Scientific Football 2005 (by KC Joyner)
