Ballparking: Practical Math for Impractical Sports Questions

by Aaron Santos

How fat would you need to be to completely block a hockey goal? How much weight could you lift if you were ant-sized? How hard would you have to hit a baseball to hit the Goodyear blimp? In this amusing and enlightening book of offbeat sports estimations, physicist Aaron Santos poses these and many other outrageous problems and shows how to answer them with Enrico Fermi’s method of approximation. Covering a wide range of sports—from football, baseball, basketball, and hockey to more far-flung sports like curling and competitive eating—these amusing estimations make boring old math fun and informative. Whether you’re a rabid sports fan, math junkie, trivia-loving math hater, or a frustrated Sunday-paper puzzle lover, with the right formula and a little imagination you can start estimating on some of the most bizarre—and previously unanswered—sports trivia, while learning how to answer your own sports questions that have kept you up at night.  

220 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 2012

Reviews

[Douglas Lord · Rating 5 out of 5]

What does a sports-loving mathematician do in his free time? If you’re Aaron Santos, you gamely attempt to answer questions like, How many swimmers can fit inside an Olympic-sized pool before it overflows (about 2000)? I think young minds will take a special shine to the explanations as Santos presents them because he 'shows his work' (as my math teachers used to say). A few pages of explanation present the hypotheses, explain the basics of calculating the problem (including the math symbols that I don’t understand but enjoy looking at), and arrive at a solution. Thus, we get answers to the titular impractical sports questions such as Assuming the rumor about rat poop in baseball hot dogs is true, what’s the total mass of rat poop consumed in MLB ballparks each season? About 54 tons. An interesting series explores the number of teeth lost by NHL Hockey players in the 90 years since its inception‚ about 27,000! Leading to a total toothpaste savings of $1.8 million! Along the way, Santos admirably explains scientific notation, that all-star running back Emmett Smith really only ran 10.4 career miles, and losing ten pounds of unsightly fat requires climbing 120,000 stairs.

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[Sydney Conrad · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great and very funny read. Not only did the author manage to make complicated math easy to understand and apply, he did it with a great sense of humor.