Just two years into his tenure as general manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey has already left an indelible imprint on the NBA. The 36-year-old is basketball's answer to Oakland A's GM and "Moneyball" protagonist Billy Beane, using elaborate statistical research and technological innovations to help make personnel decisions -- only with an academic background at Northwestern and MIT and an athletic career that ended long before the pros.

After years of first-round disappointments, the Rockets finally broke through in April, knocking off Portland to advance to the second round.

With Houston now battling the Lakers in the conference semifinals, Morey talked about finding bargain players, dealing with an economic recession, riding a statistical revolution and being willing to try new and different things to build a winning team.

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Keri: Teams have made great strides in their analysis with the improvement and increased availability of play-by-play data. Are we seeing a similar trend in basketball?

Morey: The league does gather play-by-play data at the court level, we try to use that as much as possible. We're also tracking everything else under the sun. Public resources, but also our own internal efforts.

Keri: Can you offer an example?

Morey: You can tell how often a player gets a rebound when he's on the floor, versus just that he had eight for the game. You can figure out that eight based on minutes played, but also how many chances he got, how many times the ball was in his area.

Keri: I'll ask you the same question people asked Billy Beane after "Moneyball" came out: Is there a way to talk candidly about the value of a certain player or a certain philosophy, such that it enhances the public's knowledge of the game, but without giving away the real top-secret sauce?

Morey: What we try to do is keep things pretty close to the vest. If something is in the public domain, we're pretty comfortable talking about it. But otherwise we're good about keeping things quiet.

Keri: You talked at length to Michael Lewis about Shane Battier, a player you acquired because his contributions exceeded the obvious stats. Who else on the roster fits that mold, and how are their contributions best measured?

Morey: Any time a player's value is in large part tied up in the defensive side of the ball, he's going to be underrated. Chuck Hayes is an extreme example. You couldn't understand why he's in the league if you just looked at the standard box score stats. If you just looked at points, rebounds and assists, you'd think we all need our heads examined.

Keri: What makes Hayes so good defensively? Is it defending multiple positions? Defensive rebounding? Something else?

Morey: Not to give a smart-ass answer, but yes. He does all of those things well. He can … well he can come close to guarding 1 through 5. To guard the 5, you need particular strength, and he has that. It would be a little tougher for him to guard a 1. But against 2-3-4-5, he's one of the best. He has a unique combination of lateral quickness, strength and speed all wrapped up in a great defensive mind. Because he's so limited in other ways, much more so than Shane, he wouldn't be an NBA player if those things weren't true.

Keri: Since we're talking about defense -- Dikembe Mutombo, Hall of Famer?

Morey: Surefire Hall of Famer. His play already warrants it. He provided a unique aspect on the defensive end, where he got the glamour stats like blocked shots. But he also discouraged high-percentage shots for other teams. For sure he's one of the top-five players in the game of all time in that area. Add in his off-the-court contributions as well, which are extraordinary -- maybe the most significant of any active player. Add to that his ability to play late into his career, which is astonishing, add to that his impact in the locker room, his mentoring and leading by example. We gush about him, but it's all genuine. The impact he's made is almost hard to compare. It's almost a little intimidating to try and live up to some of the standards he has set.

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They have put together a selection of the 50 Brain Teasers that people have enjoyed the most in their blog and speaking engagements.

They classify them into attention, memory, pattern recognition and planning, visual workouts and illusions, logic, math puzzles and some fun experiments.

Have a good workout! :)

Erich is currently interested in Game Theory, Geometrical Packing, Computational Complexity, and Graph Theory.

Funny Mathematician :)

It's an odd combination of Navier-Stokes equations and NASCAR driving. Computer scientists at the University of Washington have developed software that is incorporated in new technology allowing television audiences to instantaneously see how air flows around speeding cars.

The algorithm Model Reduction for Real-time Fluids, first presented at a SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference last August, was since used by ESPN and sporting-technology company Sportvision Inc. to create a new effect for racing coverage. The fast-paced innovation hit prime time in late July when ESPN used the Draft Track technology to visualize the air flow behind cars in the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, a NASCAR race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The Draft Track application calculates air flow over the cars and then displays it as colors trailing behind the car. Green, blue, yellow and red correspond to different speeds and directions for air flow when two or more cars approach one another while driving at speeds upward of 200 miles per hour.

"What ESPN wanted to do is tell the story for the viewer of how drafting works because it's such a big part of the event," said Rick Cavallaro, chief scientist at Sportvision. "How the drivers use drafting to save gas, pick up speed, et cetera."

Zoran Popović, an associate professor in the UW's department of computer science and engineering, and two students wrote the code that dramatically speeds up real-time fluid dynamics simulations. To make the simulation work in real time and be interactive, "you kind of need to rethink the math problem," he said. The new algorithm first simulates all the ways that smoke, fire -- or in this case, modified stock cars -- can behave. Then it runs the simulation for a reduced number of physically possible parameters.

Popović imagined that the first applications would be introducing interactive simulations in video games that would allow players to drive through a smoky fire, interact with the weather in a flight simulator, or drive racecars in a virtual wind tunnel. Other research results from his lab were licensed to the game industry and then adopted in video games.

Sportvision creates technology to enhance sports coverage. The company has already developed add-ons for ESPN's NASCAR coverage, placing Global Positioning System receivers, inertial measurement systems and telemetry on each car that can determine each car's speed and position several times a second. Now company engineers will use data from those sensors to model and display the air flowing over the cars.

Some have called Euler the "Mozart of Mathematics," not only because of his genius but because of his prodigious output.

Euler contributed to essentially every field of mathematics -- calculus, geometry, number theory and the vast realm of applied mathematics. "He was a universalist when that was still possible," said Dunham, who has just edited a book, "The Genius of Euler," published by the Mathematical Association of America.

Nevertheless, Euler's greatest achievements may lie in what became mathematical analysis, which includes calculus and differential equations.

Although Newton and Gottfried Leibniz discovered calculus, Euler systematized it, made hundreds of discoveries and invented differential equations, which he successfully applied to mechanics and astronomy, transforming them from geometry-based disciplines to fully calculus-based ones. He almost single-handedly invented the calculus of variations, which among other things allowed the Apollo moon shot to hit its mark.

Euler's achievements were all the more remarkable because he lived a life that was both relatively normal and quite difficult.

In his early 30s, Euler lost most of the sight in his right eye. He developed a cataract in the other and was legally blind for the last dozen years of his life. He worked incessantly even after his eyesight failed, and was, it appears, a happy man.

Says Dunham: "You could hardly argue that he wasted a day of his life."

I don't remember having to learn the vertex, focus, and directrix of the parabolas or the center, vertices, foci, and eccentricity of the hyperbola. Other than that, it is ok.

Just a note to Factor the polynomial x³ - 27 without knowing the formula.

First, when x = 3, x³ - 27 = 0 , so (x - 3) is a factor if it can be factored.

By using long division, one can find the other factor.

        x2 + 3x + 9
x - 3  /x3 - 27
     -  x3 - 3x2
           3x2 - 27
        -  3x2 - 9x
               9x - 27
           -   9x - 27