James Sehnert Lecture
Measuring Athletic Performance—the Role of Luck in Sports
A general problem in sports is the measurement of performance. In baseball, one wishes to measure the abilities of batters, pitchers, and fielders to determine salaries, to make predictions of future performance, and to give awards. The problem is that any measurement of performance is only an estimate of a player's ability and this estimate can be poor when chance variability is present. We describe good and poor measurements of baseball performance for learning players' abilities.
Jim Albert is Professor of Statistics at Bowling Green State University. His academic interests are in Bayesian modeling, statistics education, and the statistical analysis of sports data. He is the coauthor (with Jay Bennett) of Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics, and the author of the Role of Chance in the Game and Teaching Statistics Using Baseball. Jim is the new editor of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis of Sports. In sports, as a spectator, Jim is a big fan of the Phillies and, as a participant, is an active tennis player.
The 2011 Sehnert Lecture:
Monday, October 24, 2011 7:30 PM
Student Union Ballroom
Public Welcome, 5th graders and above.
We encourage math educators and students to join us for these special events!
High school teachers: At 6:00 pm, come yourself, bring a few students, and join us for a free dinner in the Student Union Ballroom. If you can make it for dinner, call the Mathematics Department office at (859) 572-5377 by Wednesday, October 12th, so that we may plan accordingly.
Note: if you wish to bring more than four students, be sure to call and check on availability of space for dinner (space may be limited).
Sponsored by the NKU Department of Mathematics and the NKU Center for Integrative Natural Science and Mathematics. For further information, contact Dr. Steven Wilkinson at wilkinson@nku.edu or by phone at (859)572-5377. Click here for a campus map.
The annual James Sehnert Lecture was established in memory of, and endowed by the estate of, the late Professor James "Duke" Sehnert, a member of the NKU Department of Mathematics and Computer Science from 1970 to 1999.
Previous Sehnert Lectures:
2010: Dr. Navah Langmeyer: An Introduction to Crytography and Public Encryption
2009: Dr. Frank Morgan: Soap Bubbles and Mathematics
2008: J.M. Cushing: Chaos from Simplicity
2007: Rose Mary Zbiek: Making Essential Ideas a Focal Point of Our Mathematics
2006: Brian Winkel: Cipher Busting by Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, William F. Friedman - and Beyond
2005: V. Frederick Rickey: Isaac Newton: Man Myth, and Mathematics
2004: Robert V. Hogg: The Importance of Understanding Variation
2003: Edward B. Burger: Magic with Mathematics
2002: Ivars Peterson: Moebius Madness
2001: Underwood Dudley: Why Mathematics