Quantitative Biology and Quantitative Football

I've written before about how mathematics can be used to unify lots and lots of different disciplines. Well, here's another great example from an article (behind paywall) from 2007. It's about how Stephen Oh, the co-founder of AccuScore, brought his knowledge of population genetics to sports:

So in 2002, Oh began writing code that simulated football teams instead of human genomes. Genes were replaced with players; mutation rate and selection pressure became the probability that a pass would be completed or that a player would run for a touchdown. Each generation became a discrete "play" in a game. The rules of American football, in which each play depends cleanly on the ones before it, lent themselves to modelling the game this way. And so the idea behind Accuscore was born.

I love this kind of thing.