Through Math for America, I am part of an on-going collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here:
https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/test-yourself-math-june-18-2012/
This question focuses on the increasing number of Americans who are collecting Social Security early. What hourly wage is equivalent to collecting social security benefits?
Through Math for America, I am part of an on-going collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here:
https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/test-yourself-math-june-13-2012/
This question is built around the recent $2 billion loss posted by the bank JPMorgan. How many yearly salaries is that loss equivalent to?
This is a nice list of famous unsolved math problems from Wolfram MathWorld:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/UnsolvedProblems.html
There are some well-known problems here, like the Goldbach Conjecture and the Collatz Conjecture, and some lesser-known open problems like finding an Euler Brick with an integral space diagonal.
It’s especially nice that several of these challenges are easy to explain to non-mathematicians. For example, the Goldbach Conjecture asks “Can every even number be written as the sum of two prime numbers?” Somewhat surprisingly, after nearly 300 years, the best answer we have is probably.
I think I’ll make this page next year’s summer homework assignment.
After creating a simple metric to evaluate the success of an NBA draft pick, I realized that the same approach could be used to evaluate the overall strength of a draft class.
To quantify the success of an individual draft pick I’m looking at the total minutes played by a player during the first two years of his contract. As far as simple evaluations are concerned, I think minutes played is as good a measure as any of a player’s value to a team, and I’m only looking at the first two years as those are the only guaranteed years on a rookie’s contract. This is by no means a thorough measure of value–it’s meant to be simple while still being relevant.
After using this measure to compare the performance of individual draft picks, I used the same strategy to evaluate the entire “Draft class”. I computed the average total minutes per player for the entire first round (picks 1 through 30, in most cases) of each draft from 2000 to 2009. Here are the results.
There doesn’t seem to be much variation among the draft classes, but the 2006 draft certainly looks weak by this measure. Upon closer inspection, that year does seem like a weak draft: the best players being LeMarcus Aldridge (2), Brandon Roy (6), and Rajon Rondo (21). The weakness of the 2000 draft also seems reasonable upon closer inspection at basketball-reference.com.
Another approach would be to somehow aggregate the career stats of each player in a draft, rather than looking at only the first two years, but that would make it difficult to compare younger and older players.
Are there any other suggestions for rating the overall strength of an NBA draft class?
Related Posts
Through Math for America, I am part of an on-going collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here:
https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/14/test-yourself-math-may-14-2012/
This question is based on the complex methods companies like Apple use to reduce their tax bills. How much more would Apple have to pay if it were taxed like an individual?