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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more