During a single season, each team in the NFL plays 16 games. Because so few games are played, it is believed that the difference between winning or losing a single game can have a substantial influence on a team’s chances of making the playoffs. In this talk we will examine this issue. The full student program can be found here.
Arts & Sciences Research
2012
What Difference Can A Single Game Make?
Johnathan Neville, Laurence D. Robinson (advisor)
Statistics
2012
Are the Statistics Really Statistics?
Emily Barbee, Ryan Rahrig (advisor)
Statistics
I will be looking at the misuse of statistics using real-life examples. I will also examine how to determine ways in which statistics are inaccurate. The full student program can be found here.
2012
Quantifying Defensive ability in Baseball
James Rader, Ryan Rahrig (advisor)
Statistics
This speech deals with the problem of quantifying the defensive ability of baseball players. The most commonly used measure of defense is fielding percentage. We will discuss several modifications of this measure that take into account other factors that help determine how much impact a player’s defensive performance has on the outcome of the game. The full student program can be found here...
2012
Parity in Professional Sports: A Comparison of the NFL, NBA, and MLB
Ryan Rahrig and Laurence D. Robinson
Statistics
In the NFL the best and worst team regular season records in modern times were as follows: In 2007 the New England Patriots went 16 – 0, and in 2008 the Detroit Lions went 0 – 16. In the NBA the best and worst team regular season records in modern times were as follows: In 1995-96 the Chicago Bulls went 72 –10, and in 1972-73 the Philadelphia 76ers went 9 – 73. In the MLB the best and worst team regular season records in modern times were as follows: In 2003 the Seattle Mariners went 116...
2012
Some explicit examples of paradoxical tournaments
Mihai Caragiu
Mathematics
A general probabilistic argument may be used to prove the existence of the so-called "k-paradoxical" tournaments. We will explore a few arithmetical ways of explicitly constructing examples of such tournaments. The full conference program can be found here.
2012
Presidential Electors and the Electoral College: An Examination of Lobbying, Wavering Electors, and Campaigns for Faithless Votes
Robert Alexander
Political Science
To visit the publisher's website, click here.
2012
The effect of select non-structural parameters upon the intensity of calculated LEED I(E) curves
Nathan Grieser, Ashley Ernst, Mellita Caragiu (advisor)
Physics
The LEED investigation of the (5x5) structure formed by sulfur adsorbed on a clean Au(111) surface results in calculated I(E) curves which exhibit unexpectedly low intensity at high energies of the probing electrons. The present study investigates various parameters used in the dynamical LEED calculation these curves, which are predominantly responsible for the intensity of the curves. Parameters such as: the Debye temperature associated with the sulfur adsorbed layer, the imaginary part of the...
2012
On a Class of Solvable Recurrences with Primes (journal paper)
Mihai Caragiu, Alexandru Zaharescu (UIUC), and Mohammad Zaki
Mathematics
Abstract: We investigate an interesting new class of “greatest prime factor sequences” (u_n)_{n\ge 1} in which every term is the greatest prime factor of the sum of all of the preceding terms. We show that these sequences are explicitly solvable, satisfying a fairly regular growth pattern. Thus, if p_n is the n-th prime, then the number of occurrences of each large enough p_n is p_{n+1}-p_{n-1} ...
2012
Tommy Steinberger recognized in The College Mathematics Journal
Tommy Steinberger (ONU-Solve, Mohammad Zaki - advisor)
Mathematics
ONU-Solve member Tommy Steinberger (advised by Dr. Mohammad Zaki) was recognized twice in The College Mathematics Journal (November 2012 Issue) for the correct solutions submitted to problems 961 and 965.
ONU-SOLVE Problem Group - https://sites.google.com/a/onu.edu/onu-solve-problem-group/
2012
Guarding a Koch Fractal Art Gallery (journal paper)
Lauren Cassell, William Roger Fuller
Mathematics
This article presents a generalization of the standard art gallery problem to the case where the sides of the gallery are continuous curves which are limits of polygonal arcs. The allowable limiting processes for such generalized art galleries are defined. We construct an art gallery in which one side is the Koch fractal and the other sides are three sides of a rectangle. The appropriate measure of coverage by guards is not the total number of guards but, rather, the guards-to-side ratio. We...
