Mathematics Day Program at UF Will Feature Coin Tossing and Marathon Running

The University of Findlay will host Mathematics Day on Thursday, March 13, in Winebrenner Theological Seminary. The speaker and subject matter originally scheduled has changed.
“Looking for Streakiness” will be presented at 10 a.m., and “Big Data and the Boston Marathon” will be presented at 1 p.m. by Dr. Jim Albert, professor of statistics at Bowling Green State University. Community members are welcome at no charge.
In the introductory session, Albert will address how to measure the patterns in the tossing of a fair coin. Questions will be asked: How can one measure if a sequence of heads/tails is unusually streaky? Are there applications to these results? The presenter will look for streakiness in homerun hitters to explore the topic.
In the 1 p.m. lecture, Albert will discuss how statistics are used to estimate projected race completion times for people who are unable to finish the race. Data including age and gender are taken into consideration.
Albert’s interests are in Bayesian modeling, statistics education and the application of statistical thinking in sports. He is Fellow of the American Statistical Association and is editor of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis of Sports. His most recent book, “Analyzing Baseball with R,” describes how to access publicly available datasets and explore the data using the open-source statistics software R.