Mathematics Department - Beliefs

Vision:

To be a value – added department that provides every Hendersonian with a good Mathematical foundation for lifelong learning.

Mission:

Through grounded practices and support, we develop resilient students with a problem-solving mind.

Friday, April 29, 2016

The Math Of Sports


Today, we look at how Math exists in sports. After reading the blog post, do find out more about how Math is integrated into other aspects of things e.g. Math in Science, Math in Nature, etc. You will then realise how Math is more integrated in our lives than we realise it...

Imagine that you have just spent a huge sum of your savings to book an airline ticket from Singapore to London just to fulfill your dream of watching your favourite football team play live. After flying for half a day and enduring a sleepness night on the plane, you finally reached your destination. 

You wake yourself up with a shower and then rushed to the stadium for the match of your life. When you arrived at your allocated seat, you realised that the person sitting directly in front of you is blocking you entire line of sight to the football field. You can't stand up because you will block the person behind. You can't move left or right throughout the game because that will distract the people sitting on the left and right of you. 

How could this have been prevented? Take a look here to find out how. 

When you are done, you can look here to see other ways in which Math is integrated into the sport of football. 

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Next, we talk about how Math is integrated into the sport of baseball. 


In sports, we want to win. As the coach of a team, we want OUR team to be the winning team. To give yourself a leg up in the game, you need to use statistics to understand your opponent better and then use it to your advantage. 

In baseball, a common statistics people look at is the batter's hitting percentage. This is calculated by taking the number of hits divide by the number of times batted. For example, if a player has a batter hitting percentage of 0.344 would mean that the player is able to get 1 hit out of every 3 times at bat. In the baseball world, that is a very good statistics and this player will be known as one of the strongest batter in his team. 

So if you are the coach of the team with this player, you would want this player to bat when bases are loaded. This will increase the probability of this player scoring more runs for your team, leading to a sweet victory.

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To be honest, there are many ways in which maths is integrated into sports. Do take the time to find out more on your own! We trust that you will do so :)

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