Mathematics and Sports (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
Who will win the tennis match - a steady and consistent player such as Chris Evert or a big-serve, big-hitter such as Martina Navratilova? Which team is better - the undefeated one with an easy schedule or the team that loses a game against a much tougher opponent? These are some of the questions discussed in this interesting book on sports and math. This book was fun to read. The 25 articles on the sports of baseball, basketball, football,golf, NASCAR (car racing), soccer, tennis, and track and field include the mathematical topics of statistics, data analysis, probability, linear algebra, Markov processes, discrete math, calculus, geometry, and plenty of modeling. These works were contributed by the authors to commemorate the 2010 Sports-and-Math theme for Mathematics Awareness Month. The Preface of this book states: "With its abundance of data, great variety, numerous strategies, and widespread popularity, sports is an ideal venue to demonstrate the illuminating power of mathematics to a larger audience" (p. vii), and that's exactly what this book does. I enjoyed the quantitative aspects of sports as well as the innovative mathematical modeling in this book. The articles contain some of the usual statistical analyses of team and individual performances and rankings along with some new and exciting ideas on specific equipment, actions, tactics, strategy, and formation. I particularly liked G. Edgar Parker's article on "Percentage Play in Tennis" and Tim Chartier's explanation of "Bending a Soccer Ball with Math." Roland Minton's article on "G.H. Hardy's Golfing Adventure" truly surprised me. Hardy, a pure mathematician who detested applied mathematics, wrote in his book, A Mathematician's Apology (London 1941) that: "Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics." "I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art." Yet here Hardy applies his pure mathematics to sports. Mathematics and Sports was an interesting and enlightening book that contains a great variety of mathematics, sports, as well as the nature of applications. For teachers of mathematics, there are many useful references to making the ideas presentable to students. By the way, if I dated myself and lost you when I referred earlier to Evert-Navratilova, you can substitute Nadal-Roddick and current men's tennis to come up with the same modern-era comparison. --Chris Arney, Mathematics and Computer Education