Category Archives: History

February 20, 2012 · 1:23 pm

One Year of Heavy Topspin

A few weeks ago, a glance through my archives revealed that, today, HeavyTopspin.com is one year old!  We’ve come a long way in that time, pushing tennis research in new directions, getting advanced tennis stats in The Wall Street Journal, and more recently, launching TennisAbstract.com.

Thanks to everyone for reading, and thank you especially to those who comment, whether here on the blog, by email, or on Twitter.  Nods are due in particular to Rick Devereaux, Tom Welsh, Carl Bialik, and Eric from stevegtennis.com.  Slowly, analytical tennis research is getting more popular as well as more fruitful.

Here’s to an even better year two!

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December 22, 2011 · 6:33 am

Bernoulli and Court Tennis

As if you needed more proof that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Most of us are fairly new to the mathematical study of tennis.  It turns out that probabilistic analysis of tennis goes back almost as far as probability theory itself, to Jacob Bernoulli, a Swiss mathematician best known for the Law of Large Numbers.

In the late 17th century, Bernoulli wrote a Letter to a Friend on Sets in Court Tennis.  I haven’t given it a thorough reading yet, but for now, I have to share a line that ought to be the epigram to just about every work of statistical analysis in sport:

You cannot conceive, as you say, that one could measure the strengths of players with numbers, much less that one could draw from these numbers all the conclusions I have drawn.

Bernoulli was born, taught, and died in Basel, which must be why tennis is still so popular there today.

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