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Maths in Football

Maths and football would not necessarily be two things you would put together but through the Discovering Mathematics module its become apparent that mathematics is everywhere. Liping Ma (1999) suggests that connectedness is one of the four properties of the teaching and learning of Fundamental Mathematics which led me to believe that if the teaching of mathematics was made relevant and somehow connected to what children are interested in they would be more inclined to want to gain knowledge about the topic. Football was the sport that most children in my class shared an interest inso this is why i chose to look into football in particular.

Before this I did not believe there was much maths in football at all. Maths is a sport, sports fall under the Physical Education category and as far as I was concerned that was that.Apart from the obvious score taking, shape of the pitch, angles at the corners, number of flags and players but looking into this further i realised there was so much more than I first thought.

THE BALL

Picture taken from – http://www.hoist-point.com/soccerball.htm

The football in which most people are familiar with is that of the typical black and white patterned ball. it is made of lots of leather pieces- 12 black pentagons and 20 white hexagons, all of which are regular. (Yakimento, 2015) On this football the 2D shapes are tessellated together as to leave no gaps between the shapes. The pentagons an the hexagons must have the same length of sides for this to happen. As well as this for all shapes to tessellate the angles on the corners need to add up to 360 degrees.

Tessellation, 2D Shapes and Angles are all mathematical factors involved here.

As well as this maths can be used to calculate many different things involving the ball for example… Distance the ball travels (Equation 1), Time it takes for the ball to travel (Equation 2) and finally the speed at which the ball travels at (Equation 3).

Picture taken from – www.bbc.co.uk

SCORE TAKING IN THE MATCH

Score taking is another part of football where maths is involved. The points system is simple if you score a goal you get a point against the other team. For example, If Dundee and Dundee United were to play against each other and Dundee scored the points would be 1-0 Dundee. If another goal was scored by Dundee the score would be 2-0.

Counting and addition are involved here.

TIME

Each football game lasts for approximately 90 minutes or to put this into a different format can be 1 hour 30 minutes. In my opinion, this is a difficult concept for children to grasp. The idea of conversion is an idea which children may find confusing. Conversion also has to be recognised by children in fractions to understand that, for example, 2 is the same as 2/1.

Time and conversion are the elements of mathematics that are involved here.

SHAPE AND DIMENTIONS OF PITCH

Picture taken from – www.conceptdraw.com

The football pitch is rectangular in shape which has a length from 90-120m and a width from 45-90m. However, a rectangle is not the only 2D shape visible on a football pitch. There are also circles and semi circles and more rectangles. Shapes can be used in many forms of mathematics for example, shape tessellation with the pattern on the football, calculating areas and measuring distances. The Pie symbol can be introduced to show children how to calculate the areas of circles and semi circles. As well as using the A= LxB equation format which can be used to find the areas of squares and rectangles. A follow up for this could be to change the units from metres to kilometres etc. to give children a grasp of the decimal system and working with smaller numbers. This would come under Ma’s Longitudinal Coherence property. As well as this, the older children could be introduced to Pythagoras’ Theorem on finding the areas of triangles if they have got a good understanding on how to find the areas of the other shapes found on the pitch. ( Although there are no triangles necessarily in football.)

REFERENCES

Ma, L. (1999) Knowing and teaching elementary mathematics: Teachers’ understanding of fundamental mathematics in china and the United States. United States: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Yakimento, Y. (2015) Mathematics of the soccer ball. Available at: http://www.hoist-point.com/soccerball.htm (Accessed: 25 November 2015).

Happy Birthday George Boole!

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Picture Taken through a screen grab of www.Google.com

I am not sure if this is entirely relevant but after searching Google for information to add into my languages assignment I came across the fancy “Google” logo. The logo was a type of maths related design, which when clicked on took me to a search of George Boole, whom I read was an English mathematician. Normally, things like that would not interest me and I would just click back to what I had intended to search but the incredible similarities between George Boole and Colin Firth were too obvious, in my opinion, to not find out who George Boole was and his input in the world of mathematics.

Pictures from Google Images

1 –www.bbc.com 2-www.bbcamerica.com

George Boole was born on the 2nd November 200 years ago!! ( which makes this post a little more relevant as it is the 2nd November today). He is known for “laying the foundations of the computer age” (Mortimer,2015) Boole created the Boolean system which allowed all maths variables to either be true or false/ on or off. 70 years after he died another man, Victor Shestakov from Moscow State University, used the Boolean code in relation the computer systems and its to this day still relied on in technology.

George grew up in Lincolnshire, England where he went to school until the end of his primary education. However after his primary years George had to help in his fathers business, as a cobbler, to try to stop it from failing. George was largely self taught as he had an interest in books so began to teach him self languages and mathematics. He then went on to open a school, at the young age of 20, where he taught mathematics and became so much more inspired by it that he went on to learn more. (George Boole facts & biography | famous mathematicians, no date) In 1849 he was made a professor in Queens College in Cork due to others in the field recommending him for the job even although he had no university degree himself, which caused contreversy in . Others reccommended him due to the fact he was becoming more and more famous and well known in his own right. He had published many maths works at the age of 26. He accepted the position and began working on his most famous work; An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, then within 2 years he was made the Dean of science . Boone married his wife Mary Everest and had 5 children with her. He tried to encourage Mary to study at the university also but he did not succeed. Sadly, Boone died from pneumonia in 1864 after he walked to the college, where he lectured, in the rain and returned home after. This is what was thought to have started the condition.

It is apparent that Boole did not realise how important his work would be to todays society. The technical age in which we live would not be as it is without him and his work.

References

George Boole facts & biography | famous mathematicians (no date) Available at: http://famous-mathematicians.org/george-boole/ (Accessed: 2 November 2015).

Mortimer, C. (2015) George Boole: Five things you need to know about the man behind today’s Google Doodle. Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/five-things-you-didn-t-know-about-george-boole-a6717401.html (Accessed: 2 November 2015).

Number Systems

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Numbers are everywhere we go but why do we have them? Time, temperature, weight, height, phone numbers and even on the front of buses. Something I learned from this input was that in fact numbers were thought to have came about through trading a long, long time ago.

Number Systems have never crossed my mind before this recent maths input, to be honest. I have always just assumed that people everywhere stuck to the “normal” , being the European system i am used to. I was aware of Roman Numerals from past school projects and some watch collections. However, I was not aware it was still used, as such, but now that I have looked into this, I see that I must have been pretty narrow-minded to think that maths and numbers would be the same worldwide.

Picture from Google Images – education.scholastic.co.uk

From further research after the workshop, I realised there was far more number systems that again I had never heard of such as Hindu- Arabic, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese. Which are displayed in the chart below.

Picture from Google Images – www.earth360.com

The task in this workshop was to create our own working number system. Our group decided to use a line per number and join them up… it worked but the higher the number the longer it would take to write. So we decided to stop at 9 and put a simple dot next to our number 1 to make 10. Our number system was a success.