Skip to main content

David Sumpter - Four Way Interview

David Sumpter is professor of applied mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. Originally from London, he completed his doctorate in Mathematics at Manchester, and held academic research positions at both Oxford and Cambridge before heading to Sweden.

 An incomplete list of the applied maths research projects on which David has worked include pigeons flying in pairs over Oxford; the traffic of Cuban leaf-cutter ants; fish swimming between coral in the Great Barrier Reef; and dancing honey bees from Sydney. In his spare time, he exploits his mathematical expertise in training a successful under-nines football team, Uppsala IF 2005. David is a Liverpool supporter with a lifelong affection for Dunfermline Athletic. You can follow David on Twitter - @soccermatics David's 2016 book is Soccermatics: mathematical adventures in the beautiful game.

Why maths?

Mathematicians often answer this question by saying maths is everywhere. I agree that maths can be found in everything, but saying that maths is ‘everywhere' can make it sound like some sort of mysterious force. When writing this book, my aim was to show that maths likes to get dirty. Maths isn’t just something abstract, but it is a set of tools for working things out and gaining insights. I want to put maths to work. In Soccermatics I show that maths can be applied to all aspects of football, from the randomness of goals, to passing networks, shot statistics, crowd movements and betting. The book takes my own experience as a researcher and applying it to football to get new answers in to the game.

 Why this book?

I really enjoy watching football, playing football and training kids to play football. So when I got a chance to write a book combining my hobby and the research I do, I was thrilled. What can be better than analysing football data and communicating about that research to fanatical football fans? Nothing. When I started my research, I found that there was so much maths in football. All the symmetries, the structure and the strategy. These can all be analysed using the tools I had previously used to model biology. The book is takes the latest research in maths, stats and data visualisation and showing how it can be used in football. 

That said, the book is not just football. I squeeze in slime moulds, hunting lionesses, fish schools, bird flocks, ants, clapping undergraduates, wise and not so wise crowds, and cancerous tumours. The point is that maths can be used to give us the edge in understanding all sorts of different parts of the world.

 What’s next?

I’m certainly not finished with football. It is so much fun. Football has fed back in to my ‘serious’ scientific research. And I am hoping to find out lots more things about the game.

 What’s exciting you at the moment?

After I finished writing the book, I started thinking about whether the research I have done could have an impact on football clubs. I began a Twitter account doing mathematical analysis of games. In February, I was invited to the OptaPro forum to talk about what I had found out. I presented work from one of the chapters of the book about how to create tactical maps. This was a really interesting experience, to talk to football analysts and see how they saw mathematics contribution to their sport. The analysts were very open to new ideas and I hope to work more closely with football teams in the future. I am not signed by any club yet, but if a Premier League side would like to offer me a 3-year contract, I could be tempted…

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...
Post a Comment
Read more