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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…
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