[Keith H. Thompson]

Retired mathematical statistician (as opposed to pie graphs) from a National Laboratory. An example of a relation to baseball was a letter to the editor of Sports Collectors Digest from a reader who had noted (somewhat surprisingly) that in the set of over 800 Topps and over 800 Donruss for a year (I believe in the eighties) there were exactly two matches. One was Tom Tresh and I forget the other. That is, Tom Tresh had the same number in both sets. He expressed his surprise and astonishment and wrote that this must be a very unusual event. It is actually not unusual but an example of a famous 18th century French gambling game where the house lays out a deck of 52 cards, and the player lays out his randomly shuffled deck of 52 cards and wins if he scores at least one match. The readers observation is complicated because the Topps and Donruss sets are of different sizes, but there is a large overlap of players and managers. I solved the problem for the unequal sizes and for three sets of cards. It is not obvious, but the exact solution is the sum of an alternating finite series depending upon the number of cards. It is surprisingly interesting (at least to me) that this sum converges rapidly so that after eight terms the answer doesn't change to the fifth decimal place whether you have a deck of eight cards or eight million cards.