Tag Archives: python

Mathematical Modelling of Football

This fall I took the course Mathematical Modelling of Football from Uppsala University. It was taught by Professor David Sumpter, and I believe this is the first academic course of its kind. The main subjects covered are modelling and analysis of events (on the ball actions), movement and pitch control (tracking data), player evaluation, and match result simulations. There were also several guest lectures from (among others) William Spearman, lead data scientist at Liverpool FC, and Javier Fernández, head of sports analytics at FC Barcelona.

The tools used were Python (using Anaconda) with NumPy, Pandas and Matplotlib. The course was a lot of work, especially the assignments, but I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.

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Exercises in Programming Style

In the book club at work, we recently finished reading Exercises in Programming Style by Cristina Videira Lopes. The book consists of a simple program implemented in 33 different programming styles. It is a great way of showing the different styles, and the book was quite popular in the book club. The book is relatively new (it was published in 2014), and I don’t think it is as well-known as it deserves to be. So here is a summary and review of it. Continue reading

Programming for Grade 8

For the past two months, I have been helping my son’s grade 8 class to learn to program. All students wrote Python programs and got a feel for what programming is. This post has details on how we organized the course, code examples and lessons learned. Continue reading

Coursera Course Review: Computational Investing Part 1

I recently finished the Coursera course Computational Investing Part 1 by professor Tucker Balch at Georgia Tech. The focus of the course is on portfolio analysis and selection. Almost all the analysis uses the daily closing prices of stocks as the starting point. The concepts are not particularly difficult, and the programming exercises give you good hands-on experience with the different analysis techniques. The assignments are in Python using several tool kits for time series analysis (NumPy, Pandas and the QuantSoftware ToolKit). Continue reading

Switching from Java to Python – First Impressions

Three months ago I changed jobs, and in the process switched from Java to Python. Here are the differences that have stood out for me since making the switch. Continue reading