Basketball: Mathematicians Prove Umps Not Fair
And how to succeed at free throws – It’s not occult magic, it’s straight science: Lots of interesting things have arrived and one of these is the basketball season. Two engineers have figured out the best way to shoot a free throw, a frequently underappreciated skill that gets more important as the game clock winds down.
Chau Tran and Larry Silverberg say, “To get a swish rather than a brick, you need the best possible conditions for releasing the basketball from your hand.” They used hundreds of thousands of three-dimensional computer simulations of basketball free-throw trajectories to arrive at their conclusions. After running the simulations, Tran and Silverberg arrived at a number of major recommendations to improve free-throw shooting.
read more