Articles

My Articles

Long-Term Stable, Quick-Reacting Table Tennis Ratings via Poisson Jumps: September 24, 2023; revised July 27, 2025.
Ratings Central: Accurate, Automated, Bayesian Table Tennis Ratings for Clubs, Leagues, Tournaments, and Organizations: NESSIS (New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports), September 24, 2011. Video of My Presentation, Program and Abstracts, Presentations and Videos, Photos.
Ratings Central: Accurate, Automated, Bayesian Table Tennis Ratings for Clubs, Leagues, Tournaments, and Organizations: Joint Statistical Meetings, July 30–August 4, 2011. Session, Abstract.
NÖTTV Interview With David Marcus: June 17, 2010.
New Table-Tennis Rating System: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series D (The Statistician), 2001, vol. 50, part 2, pp. 191-208.

What was the recent Nobel Prize in Physics really about?: Guest post on the Computational Complexity blog, October 30, 2022.
Separates the quantum mechanics sense from the nonsense while being as non-technical as possible: Review of Quantum Sense and Nonsense by Jean Bricmont, May 17, 2020.
eLetter to the Editor on the news article Quantum weirdness confirmed by Adrian Cho (scroll to the bottom of the page to see the eLetter): News article: Science Magazine, vol. 350, issue 6267, p. 1463, Dec. 18, 2015; article requires subscription to access on website. eLetter published Feb. 19, 2016; eLetter can be accessed on Science Magazine website without subscription.
Letter to the Editor on Bell’s Theorem and the Demise of Local Reality by Stephen McAdam: The American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 111, no. 5, pp. 456–457, May 2004.
Dispensing with the Philosophical Baggage of Traditional Quantum Mechanics: Letter to the Editor, SIAM News, vol. 36, no. 4, p. 6, May 2003.

If you have two reals in a box: Guest post on the Computational Complexity blog, February 21, 2022. Answer.
Do Four Colors Suffice?: Guest post on the Computational Complexity blog, August 1, 2021.
An investment puzzle and speculation as to why some think it is hard: Guest post on the Computational Complexity blog, April 18, 2021.
Obit for Richard Dudley: Obituary for Richard M. (Dick) Dudley (1938–2020), May 19, 2020.
Mathematical Folk Knowledge: Things that (almost) all mathematicians know, but few non-mathematicians know. August 3, 2019; revised December 10, 2023.
Little-Known Resolutions of Well-Known Paradoxes: Discussion of several well-known paradoxes whose correct resolutions are not well known. The paradoxes discussed are the Liar Paradox, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Newcomb’s Paradox, Is It Rational to Vote?, and the Unexpected Hanging. September 11, 2016; revised June 27, 2017, May 6, 2018, November 14, 2020.
Prisoner’s Dilemma: Letter to the Editor, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 51, no. 7, p. 735, August 2004.

Coding Style Is Important: Guest post on the Computational Complexity blog, September 2, 2025.
Fortran is underated!: Joint post on the Computational Complexity blog, July 7, 2019.

Behind the Scenes at the TOC: What happened at the Tournaments of Champions (TOC), June 8, 1990–June 17, 1990. The TOC consisted of the Fifth World Veterans Championships, the 1990 U.S. Open, and the International Junior Championships. Article written August 21, 1990, and published in the USATT magazine that year.
Does It Matter Who Serves First?: Is there an actual (not psychological) advantage to serving first in table tennis as there is in some sports?
Comparison of 11-Point and 21-Point Match Formats: Which 11-point-game match formats correspond to which 21-point-game match formats?
Giving Byes to Top Seeds Is Unfair: The ITTF rule on how to place byes in a single-elimination event can favor a lower-seeded player over a higher-seeded player.
Fundamental Table Tennis Geometry: A discussion of basic table-tennis footwork.

Retire Statistical Significance by Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, Blake McShane, Nature, 567, pp. 305–307, March 20, 2019: A Comment in the journal Nature co-signed by 854 scientists from 52 countries, including me.
Understanding Numbers in Elementary School Mathematics, 2011, 978-0-8218-5260-6; Teaching School Mathematics: Pre-Algebra, 2016, 978-1-4704-2720-7; Teaching School Mathematics: Algebra, 2016, 978-1-4704-2721-4; Rational Numbers to Linear Equations, 2020, 978-1-4704-5675-7; Algebra and Geometry, 2020, 978-1-4704-5676-4; Pre-calculus, Calculus, and Beyond, 2020, 978-1-4704-5677-1; by Hung-Hsi Wu, published by American Mathematical Society: Read these books if you have a child learning mathematics in school or wish to understand school-level mathematics yourself. Errata.

Quantum Sense and Nonsense by Jean Bricmont, Springer Cham, 2017, 978-3-319-65270-2: An antidote to the nonsense of the usual explanations of quantum mechanics. Cats cannot be both alive and dead (which was Schrödinger’s point).
Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics by Jean Bricmont, Springer Cham, 2016, 978-3-319-25887-4: Another antidote to the nonsense of the usual explanations of quantum mechanics. More technical than the author’s Quantum Sense and Nonsense. Read them both.

Coding Guidelines: Finding the Art in the Science; What separates good code from great code? by Robert Green and Henry Ledgard, ACM Queue, vol. 9, no. 11, November 2, 2011: An article on how to write great code. I’m mentioned in the Acknowledgments at the end.
Professional Pascal: Essays on the Practice of Programming by Henry F. Ledgard, Addison-Wesley, 1986, 9780201117769: A must-read book on programming (regardless of whether you use Pascal).

Devil to Play by Eric Dexheimer, Westword, July 1, 1999: Denver Tennis Club’s 4.5 men’s team.

Collision Course by T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, Robert Faturechi, Agnes Chang, Pro Publica, December 20, 2019: When the USS John S. McCain crashed in the Pacific, the Navy blamed the destroyer’s crew for the loss of 10 sailors. The truth is the Navy’s flawed technology set the McCain up for disaster.
When Failure is Not an Option by Robert Pool, Technology Review, July 1, 1997: Some organizations seem to have purged “human error”, operating highly complex and hazardous technological systems essentially without mistakes. How do they do it?

The Nurturing Parent by John S. Dacey, Ph.D., and Alex J. Packer, Ph.D., Child, November 1992, pp. 96, 107–109, 112–113, 216: 6 Ways to Make Your Child Happy (and why they work).

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap.