What’s wrong with baseball – mathematically that is?
Investigator Stanley Eigen writes:
What’s wrong with baseball – mathematically that is?
I don’t know but apparently G.H. Hardy did.
Hardy was a pure mathematician in Cambridge. Outside of mathematics, he is probably best known as having recognized the Indian genius Ramanujan. Just to remind you, Ramanujan was a poor clerk in Madras with limited education who invented (discovered – whatever you want to call it) a huge number of new mathematical formulas. In 1913, he sent off three letters crammed with equations to English mathematicians. The first two mathematicians ignored him. The third, Hardy, knew genius when he saw it.
Anyway, besides mathematics, Hardy’s passion was cricket. He didn’t just watch cricket or play cricket, he analyzed cricket, judged people by their own analysis of cricket and rated people in terms of cricket.
C. P. Snow was a physicist and novelist. He went on to coin the phrase “The Two Cultures”, lamenting the gulf between scientists and “literary intellectuals”. He tells of his first meeting with Hardy when he was a new fellow at Christ’s College. Hardy, he explained “without any preamble whatever began: ‘You’re supposed to know something about cricket, aren’t you?’ ” Hardy proceeded to put him through “a moderately stiff viva”, after which came a series of “more tactical questions.”
Snow passed, they became friends and it was to Snow that Hardy told about his letter. You see, Hardy, being a famous mathematician, was often invited to the United States. But there was no cricket. So Hardy turned to baseball. I was told, that Hardy once explained that he preferred visiting Harvard University to Princeton University because Boston had two baseball teams while Princeton had none (the Braves were still in Boston at that time).
But there was a problem and, according to Snow, Hardy “wrote a serious suggestion to the Baseball Commissioners, proposing a technical emendation to one of the rules.” What that was, and if it was implemented I just don’t know.
(I got the quotes from the foreword to Hardy’s book A Mathematician’s Apology. The book is approximately 100 pages but Hardy only wrote half of it. The other half is the foreword by Snow.)