News from the world of maths

Scientists/cricket geeks have shown that the weather has a significant effect on the results of the Ashes cricket series between Australia and England when the series is held in Australia. The Australian cricket team is more likely to succeed after El Niño years, while the English cricket team does better following La Niña years, the opposite phase when the weather is cooler and wetter. But how significant is this effect and should the teams change their strategies accordingly?

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Labels: Latest news, sports

At the very heart of sport is a fierce battle in which the combatants strive to outwit and outplay each other. Each thrust is matched by a parry and in the end, there can only be one winner. The rules of each sport dictate how that winner is determined, and whether it is football, tennis, golf or chess, it is those who perform best on the day who take home the glory. This latest installment of the Plus sports page looks at two ranking systems that couldn't be any different from each other — those of sumo and chess.

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Labels: Latest news, sports

What can we learn from the British successes at the 2008 Olympics? Over the last few years in the lead-up to the London 2012 Games, there has been a massive influx of money and enthusiasm in the UK into Olympic sports and infrastructure. Other countries have shown similar improvement ahead of hosting the game. So is Britain's triumph an early result of the home advantage? And how will Britain perform in 2012?

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Labels: sports

The recent news of the great Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar surpassing West Indian Brian Lara's record number of test runs has given maths-loving cricket geeks another opportunity to pull out their calculators and Excel spreadsheets. Marc West is openly one of these nuts and did just that.

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Labels: sports

Plus is proud to bring you a brand new regular feature: the Plus sports page. This will be regularly updated with stories exploring the maths in sports, from analysing scoring statistics to planning the perfect strategy.

We start off by looking at — what else? — football. Being the manager of a Premier League football club may seem like one of the most glamorous jobs in the world — with the fame comes fortune and the opportunity to travel (well, to Hull, Wigan and Portsmouth anyway). However, as far as job security goes, football managers live on the edge. Their terms can be terminated almost on a whim by their club's owner, and they live and die by their team's results.

It would seem that there is no way to predict how long their tenures will be. However, a collection of researchers from the UK, Singapore and the US have found that there may be a strong mathematical trend underlying how long football managers stay in their jobs.

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Labels: sports