How to predict the outcome of a coin toss

Legend holds that the city of Portland, Oregon, was nearly called Boston. A coin toss in 1845 between Francis Pettygrove, who hailed from a different Portland, in Maine, and Asa Lovejoy, from Boston (the one in Massachusetts) eventually decided the matter. But things might have turned out differently, per Frantisek Bartos, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, if people were not such wobbly tossers.

Mr Bartos was interested in a prediction made by Persi Diaconis, Susan Holmes and Richard Montgomery, a group of American mathematicians. In 2007 the trio analysed the physics of a flipping coin and noticed something intriguing. Besides sending it somersaulting end-over-end, most people impart a slight rotation to a coin. That causes the axis about which the coin is flipping to drift while it is in the air, a phenomenon called precession.