Books
M. Brodie, Every Shot Counts: Using the Revolutionary Strokes Gained Approach to Improve Your Golf Performance and Strategy, Avery (2014).
Strokes gained is a paradigm-shifting statistic for golf, and Brodie’s book goes in depth on what it all means for the way we should value driving, iron play, short game, and putting.
R. Minton, Golf by the Numbers: How Stats, Math, and Physics Affect Your Game, John Hopkins University Press (2012).
This book describes a number of topics where math provides insight into golf, including the Hardy golf problem (look for a reference to my work), which I discuss in this post.
Articles
B. W. Holmes,Putting: How a golf ball and hole interact, Am. J. Phys. 59, 129 (1991).
Despite being several decades old, this article is a fantastic, detailed look at what happens to a ball when it reaches the hole; why sometimes it drops and other times it doesn’t. The author conludes that the effective radius of the hole shrinks as the speed of the ball increases (i.e. the faster the ball hits the hole, the more direct the impact must be for the ball to drop), and he determines exactly how the effective radius changes as a function of ball speed.
A. R. Penner, The physics of putting, Can. J. Phys. 80, 83 (2002).
This is a nice follow up to the Holmes article, in which the author examines how some of Holmes’s findings change when the putt is not straight. Interestingly, he finds that a downhill putt is more likely to be holed than an uphill putt, though the added difficulty of getting the correct speed may negate this effect.
M. Broadie, Assessing Golfer Performance Using Golfmetrics, Science and Golf V: Proceedings of the 2008 World Scientific Congress of Golf, Chapter 34 (2008).
This is the article in which Mark Brodie first introduces the strokes gained metric (though here it is called “shot value”) which revolutionized modern golf analytics.
R. Minton, G.H. Hardy’s Golfing Adventure, Mathematics Awareness Month (2010).
This article discusses and extends the original model proposed by G.H. Hardy of a golfer who hits either excellent, normal, or bad shots. I discuss this model in depth in this post.