The $700,000 Man and the Joy Of All Things Random
Who doesn’t love an indecipherable story involving an eye-catching sum of money?
My new favorite is the king of Norway awarding French mathematician Michel Talagrand the Abel Prize for his breakthrough work in studying and quantifying randomness.
The Abel Prize, the mathematics world version of the Nobel Prize, comes with a markedly non-random reward: 7.5 million Norwegian kroner, which is about $700,000.
What fascinates me, for starters, is the premise of Monsieur Talagrand’s work. Isn’t the idea of quantifying randomness an oxymoron? Isn’t the whole point that it can’t be quantified because it’s, you know, random?
If you’re Michel Talagrand, apparently not. But then, we also must consider the intellectual level on which he is operating. When reporter Jordana Cepelewiz in the science magazine Quanta explained how he won the prize, the article was full of sentences such as this one: “Like his generic chaining method, Talagrand’s concentration inequalities appear all over mathematics.”
Check, please.
To be fair, Cepelewicz distills some of Talagrand’s work into terms a civilian at least recognizes. Take, for instance, coin flips, a bedrock of randomness. If you flip a coin once, it’s totally random whether you get heads or tails. If you flip it 10 times, about 66% of the time you will get heads 4, 5 or 6 times — meaning the randomness has started to even out. If you flip the coin 1,000 times, more than 99.7% of the time you will get between 450 and 550 heads, meaning the randomness has moderated even further.
Not that the king handed Talagrand $700,000 to flip coins. Talagrand also applies his mathematical findings to more practical projections, like the chances of a riverbank overflowing or the maximum potential power of a volcanic eruption.
That’s the kind of information the citizenry of Pompeii could have used 1,945 years ago, though I have to confess he’s already starting to lose me on exactly how he can reliably declare those parameters.
And that’s okay. I’m easy to lose. I spend my life in the shallow end of the mathematics pool, where there is certainty only that 9 times 7 equals 63 or the square of the hypotenuse of a triangle equals the combined squares of the legs.
Beyond that, I cling defiantly to the notion that some randomness still can be, well, random.
Take baseball.
As with other sports, baseball commentary and analysis has been overrun in recent years by numbers and statistics. Once upon a time baseball had a dozen numbers all fans could understand, like batting average or earned run average. Now it has more abbreviations than the federal government: OPS, WAR, wRC+, wOBA, FIP, DRS, BABIP, UZR, ISO, LI, wRAA and so on, until long after my eyes have crossed.
Many of these stats, I’m guessing, go into calculating something called “win probability,” which after each at-bat tells us that Team X has, say, a 71.2% chance of winning the game.
And maybe it does, except four batters later that could be 36.4%. Because of, yes, randomness.
Or, to put it another way, say the Yankees are playing the Orioles. Say it’s the bottom of the ninth, the Yankees are trailing 5–4 and they have runners on second and third with two out and Aaron Judge coming to bat. The Orioles have countered by bringing in their new potential closer, Craig Kimbrel.
Since we have oceans of statistics on both Judge and Kimbrel, numbers mavens could undoubtedly formulate, with a few keystrokes, the probability that Judge will get a game-winning hit. Or that Kimbrel ends the game by striking him out.
We also know, anecdotally, that Judge is the Yankees’s most feared hitter and Kimbrel, while still a decent pitcher, has had inconsistent stretches for several years.
So if I’m an Orioles fan, I’m a little worried. But in reality, I don’t know. No one knows. No statistic can predict the outcome of this matchup on this night, in this game. We have to watch it play out in real time, in live action, on the field. It does not matter that Judge would theoretically get the game-winning hit 34.7% of the time if he strikes out this time.
Randomness. It’s one of the great beauties of sports — and in many ways, I suppose, life.
I have full admiration for Michel Talagrand. I’m delighted someone is advancing our understanding of the world in areas that transcend coin flips. He has earned the 7.5 million kroner.
I will also not relinquish my affection for things that defy all projection. Que sera, sera.
