Mathematics in Football
This list is written to accompany a blog about the maths to be found in football on the eve of the 2014 Football World Cup Tournament.
The topics refered to are
Euler's Formula
Statistics in football
Bowland activity exploring the mathematics of different aspects of football.
Crystal Shapes 1
This activity explores the rotational symmetry of crystals. Students work with plain and coloured nets of cubes.
The investigation then explores Euler’s formula, which is the relationship between the number of vertices, edges and faces for each crystal, before students test their conjecture on other solids.
Focus Year 10/11 Shape and Space Core
Pages 44 and 45 of the pdf contains an activity about Euler's Formula as part of a longer topic on 3D shapes.
Panels of a Football
A numberphile video which uses Euler's Formula to prove how many pentagons and hexagons there must be on a standard football.
Euler's Formula
This page on the Maths is Fun website explores Euler's Formula for a number of different solids.
Football Statistics
This Numberphile video explores how football matches are described using statistics.
Working with Opta
A numberphile video looking at the work done by the company Opta who supply TV stations with football statistics for their broadcasts.
Maths in sport - soccer booklets
These three Eigen publications booklets provide a range of data handling activities based on football. The booklets largely focus on calculation of means and the use of tallies, frequency tables and bar graphs. .
• Soccer goals provides activities are based on calculation of averages, tally charts and bar charts.
• Soccer pitches includes investigations such as “are more goals scored on small pitches or large pitches?”
• Soccer attendances includes routine calculations and encourages observations from the results.
Football
This Bowland activity is based around video clips of the Swanscombe Tigers youth football team training and preparing for a game. There are three activities:
• Pre-Match training
• Passing the ball
• Penalties - particularly appropriate for the world cup