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Posts on Matifutbol

A very special greetings card
December 6, 2014. Matifutbol
A greetings card for the new year introduces us to the history of the binary numeration systems, the steganographic methods of encryptation, the numerology on Renaissance works, and the origins of the sign of substraction.

Mathematical Halloween
October 27, 2014. Matifutbol
Mathematics often inspire fear to many people. And sometimes even rightly. So, in a game that takes place in Transylvania we discover some very special and mysterious figures: the vampire numbers.

An impossible transfer
September 30, 2014. Matifutbol
A football agent burdened by failing to make any transfer during the summer, suddenly comes across a unique opportunity. The problem is that the acquiring team and the selling team have seemingly opposing interests. Will he be able to please both sides? The Will Rogers phenomenon and the game theory.

The mathematical murderer
June 30, 2014. Matifutbol
A player has been killed in the locker room at halftime of a match of the World Cup Brazil 2014. A series of mathematical clues leads you to solve the mystery, with the help of inspector Larry Flanagan and official Joe Vitruvius, that will introduce the fascinating world of Combinatorics.

Trees and googols at World Cup 2014
June 7, 2014. Matifutbol
A new mathematical cocktail whose stars are the World Cup in Brazil, the different systems of competition, the number of Wedderburn-Etherington and the tree topology.

Probability and sunrise
March 25, 2014. Matifutbol
Sometimes it's more difficult to set out a problem correctly than to solve it. Do you know the two-envelopes paradox?

Fibonacci also plays football
January 28, 2014. Matifutbol
A new signing, a public secret, sports betting, spirals, sunflowers, the Parthenon, and a Greek newspaper. Ready for the new story of Matifutbol? Fibonacci also plays football.

Magic 2014
December 22, 2013. Matifutbol
The turn of the year gives us an excellent excuse to go over various mathematical properties of natural numbers, making a comparison between the numbers 13 and 14. With this story, Matifutbol wishes you a Merry Christmas and hopes that 2014 will be a magical year for you.

The amazing case of the extra car
November 27, 2013. Matifutbol
The sponsor of the Football World Championship 2015 in Canada i going to give away some gifts to the best scorers. But a last minute change in the number of gifts creates a curious change in their apportionment. Try to find out what happens!

Breakfast at Les Deux Magots
October 25, 2013. Matifutbol
The friendship paradox: a good excuse for practicing with the statistical mean and the variance. Friendship has been one of the areas in which the extension of social networking has had the greatest impact. From time to time we look askance at the friends counter of our friends. Sometimes with curiosity, other times with some envy, or indifference, or admiration. Some people are even obsessed with it. My new entry in Matifutbol is dedicated to them, and to everybody in general. Hope you like it.

Herds of goats and group decisions.
September 23, 2013. Matifutbol
A last minute problem in the preparation of the season takes us into the process by which a group can adopt erroneous or irrational decisions. Abilene paradox.

Football and happiness
July 23, 2013. Matifutbol
The formula for happiness: an easy mathematical refreshment for this summer, that helps us not to forget exponentiation.
After the final of the Champions Leagu, won by Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund players are happy, while Bayern Munich players are sad. Guess what happens!


June 17, 2013. Matifutbol
It's difficult to agree on what we know, when each one uses different data.
But when we all start from the same data, should not always reach the same conclusions?
A story which mixes statistical paradoxes, charts, news, media, index numbers, sports trophies, data tables, economic results, football clubs and contrary opinions.
And where everyone seeks to be right.
May 15, 2013. Matifutbol
Thanks to a prize consisting on the proceeds of a football match, wer learn about some numbers that attract the others, which can't escape from them. Mathematical sequences which lead to mathematical black holes.

Thanks
April 28, 2013. Matifutbol
Many thanks to all those who visited my website during this first year of Matifutbol. Thanks to all those who liked it, to those who shared it, to those who proposed new ways of solving the problems, to those who detected the errors I made; to all the 25.000 internauts from all the world who visited Matifutbol. For the next twelve months, I'll keep on making more stories, in order to help you teach Maths to your students I hope you'll like them.

Let's give away some balls
April 5, 2013. Matifutbol
Organizers of Brazil 214 FIFA World Cup want to give away some official balls. We face a close-paking problem in order to know if we can fill Maracana stadium with enough balls to satisfy the Championship organizers' wishes.

The problem of the fair division
March 1, 2013. Matifutbol
Some African football players are going to play a benefit match. Eto'o and Drogba have been designated captains of the two teams, but they don't know how to split the rest of the players in two teams. Do you know how can they do a fair distribution so that both will be satisfied? Do you dare to manage this new problem of lateral thinking?

Mesut Özil and the Fermat point
February 16, 2013. Matifutbol
Mourinho is thinking about how to counter more effectivily the game of F.C. Barcelona midfielders,,. That way, thanks to the tactical arrangement of a football team, we study one of the notable points of the triangle lesser known but with many practical applications: the Fermat point. 

Do you dare to count? A forward-and-back problem.
October 16, 2012. Matifutbol
A modern adaptation of an easy problem of the XIX century which becomes difficult if we don't approach it in the right way.

The fantastic pencil of Sir Alex Ferguson and the Champernowne constant
September 19, 2012. Matifutbol
A practical example set in the World Cup, and based on the memory capacity of an excellent trainer, helps us to introduce the conceptual and practical implications of the Champernowne constant.

September 7, 2012. Matifutbol
A player with an incredible memory, and the forward and back bus travel, allow us to put in practice Bolzano’s theorem and the intermediate point theorem.

August 5, 2012. Matifutbol
A simple election on which player should kick a penalty leads us to the Simpson’s paradox and its political implications in what we call Gerrymandering.

The birthday paradox
June 15, 2012. Matifutbol
Sometimes we admire about some ‘strange’ coincidences we find in some groups of people. But there's nothing special at all, it’s simply Mathematics.

June 6, 2012. Matifutbol
A reserve player analyses the probabilities of entering the field game, introducing a rather evident mathematical paradox.

The golden goalkeeper and the Arrow paradox
April 15, 2012. Matifutbol
A gala for choosing the best goalkeeper of the decade leads us to the world of voting and its paradoxes, like Arrow’s one.