MAA Vice President
Weissman Family Professor of Business Analytics - Babson College
Term: July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2026

This Section Visitor is available to present on the following topics at Section meetings:

Fraud Detection with Benford’s Law
There are many ways to connect traditional mathematics topics to important modern applications. These connections can help mathematics majors be prepared to enter careers in many fields, particularly data science. In this talk, we present an example of this type of connection by discussing applications of Benford’s Law. This is a surprisingly simple discrete probability distribution that has proven to be useful in various fields, particularly fraud detection in accounting. This is a wonderful example of theory preceding practice as the distribution was known for decades before the applications were implemented

Sports Applications of Mathematics in the Era of Legalized Gambling
We are now more than twenty years beyond the publication of Michael Lewis’ classic book Moneyball, which popularized the previously niche subject of sports analytics. Since that time the field has grown and evolved, and now the introduction of legalized wagering on sports has made a generation much more interested in sports applications of mathematics. In this presentation, we will look at some of the key analytics ideas that are now deeply ingrained in sports teams and leagues, and we will demonstrate some ‘non-standard’ uses of mathematics in sports that are not well known. The example provided can be adapted for teaching at almost any mathematical level.

Many to One:  The Costs and Benefits of Summary Measures
Evaluating the impact of an athlete’s performance on a team, deciding on a treatment plan for a cancer patient, and evaluating how to encourage people to manage their weight are all interesting and carefully studied problems. In these examples and many others, decision-makers often ultimately rely on scoring systems that reduce high-dimensional data to a single value. We present the ways that scoring systems are similar across many applications, how they provide insights, how they can lead to difficulties, and how they can be evaluated and improved.

For more information about the Section Visitor program, please visit the Section Visitor webpage.