BOOK/REVIEW: “Mathletics: A Scientist Explains 100 Amazing Things About the World of Sports”

[Ryan Goble]

Louis Menand did a fun "review" of the Olympics including books of interest. If folks don't know about “Mathletics: A Scientist Explains 100 Amazing Things About the Worl... it sounds like ight might be worth checking out. An excerpt of the review...

John D. Barrow’s “Mathletics: A Scientist Explains 100 Amazing Things About the World of Sports” (Norton) is about sports in general, not just Olympic sports, and may sometimes seem to fly far over the head of the ordinary math slob. We learn, for instance, that the maximum speed, V, possible for a racewalker is given by the formula V2 = ½gL [3√ (4 – S2/L2) – 4], where g is the acceleration caused by gravity, L is the length of the walker’s leg, and S is the length of the stride.

There is a payoff, though. First, the formula explains why racewalkers make that windup-toy hip movement: they’re trying to increase V by effectively increasing L, the length of their legs. Second, it turns out that world-record speeds in racewalking are mathematically impossible, unless both feet are losing contact with the ground, which is a violation of the rules of the sport. It’s time to clean up racewalking!

Barrow’s larger point is that achievement in sports must comply with the laws of physics. This was, minus the math, my own youthful realization. You can dedicate your life to the sport, but, if you are under six feet tall and weigh less than two hundred pounds, you are never going to throw the discus seventy metres. The motto of athletic competition should not be “Follow your dream.” It should be “Follow your reality.”

Innovative techniques are therefore basically efforts to tweak one of the coefficients in the equation governing speed, height, or distance in a sport. When you jump, you are exerting energy, by running and pushing off the ground, to raise as high as possible not simply your body but your center of gravity. If you curl into a U shape at the top of your leap, as high jumpers and pole vaulters do, you will be able to clear a bar while your center of gravity passes underneath it. The curvier you become, the greater the height you can achieve. In the 1968 Games, in Mexico City, the American high jumper Dick Fosbury won the gold medal by flipping himself over the bar head first and backward—a technique now known as the Fosbury Flop. He set an Olympic record, which made it a lot easier for people to forget that his leap looked like something out of the Ministry of Silly Jumps, and now every high jumper does it.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/08/06/120806crat...