The Boston Red Sox, pictured last month, drove up ticket sales after sending out targeted physical mail
Alika Jenner/Getty Images
Games of Edges
Bruce Schoenfeld (W. W. Norton)
THE professional athletes who charge up and down playing fields for the public’s entertainment in the world’s biggest sports leagues seem a world away from scientists and mathematicians. At first glance, the two seem to come from different worlds with different aims, and the old stereotype of sporty teenagers stuffing their science-loving peers into school lockers endures to this day.
Yet in the past two decades, …