{"id":3439,"date":"2018-02-20T15:48:38","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T20:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/blogonmathblogs\/?p=3439"},"modified":"2018-02-20T15:48:38","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T20:48:38","slug":"gold-medal-math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/blogonmathblogs\/2018\/02\/20\/gold-medal-math\/","title":{"rendered":"Gold Medal Math"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past week and a half or so, my computer browser has been finding its way to NBC\u2019s Olympics coverage while I\u2019m supposed to be doing other things. I might have a different answer the next time I watch a Simone tumble through the air<\/span><\/a> or shoot through the water,<\/span><\/a> but right now after seeing Chloe Kim<\/span><\/a> and Nathan Chen<\/span><\/a> defy the laws of gravity, I\u2019m inclined to agree with June Thomas at Slate that the winter Olympics are the best Olympics<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Credit: Jankenhoi, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0<\/p><\/div>\n

As a bonus, I can justify my short-term skate, ski, and snowboard obsession by reminding myself that winter Olympics events are exhilarating, gorgeous examples of applied math, physics, and engineering.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wrote about the physics of figure skating jumps<\/span><\/a> for Smithsonian, and I\u2019ve enjoyed reading about the math and physics of other events as well. Jen Ouelette wrote about taking a curling expedition with a group of physicists<\/span><\/a> for her blog Cocktail Party Physics. Dina Spector explained why speed skaters swing their arms back and forth<\/span><\/a> for Business Insider. Larry Greenemeier at Scientific American wrote about how the U.S. skeleton team tested their equipment and body positions in a simulator at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute<\/span><\/a>. Big air snowboarding, a new Olympic sport this year, is a physics marvel, as Scientific American<\/span><\/a> and Wired<\/span><\/a> have explained.\u00a0Teachers who want to use the Olympics in their classrooms have some suggestions from the New York Times Learning Network<\/span><\/a> and the American Association of Physics Teachers<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The sports themselves are where most of the magic happens, but I have also enjoyed learning about some math and physics behind the scenes. For instance, did you know we don\u2019t actually know why ice is slippery? F Yeah Fluid Dynamics explains some of the theories and controversies<\/span><\/a> in the first post of her series about the winter Olympics. And the National Institute of Standards and Technology explores one of the most important behind-the-scenes parts of the Olympics: precision measurements<\/span><\/a>. FiveThirtyEight has joined the fray with medal forecasting<\/span><\/a> and data-driven stories about Olympic sports<\/span><\/a>. I was particularly interested in Ella Koeze\u2019s analysis of what might happen if men and women competed against each other in skiing events<\/span><\/a>. Finally, the Olympic rings themselves have some math to them. I wrote about the topology of the connected sum of four Hopf links<\/a> in the summer of 2016.<\/span><\/p>\n

Enjoy the rest of the games!<\/p>\n

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For the past week and a half or so, my computer browser has been finding its way to NBC\u2019s Olympics coverage while I\u2019m supposed to be doing other things. I might have a different answer the next time I watch … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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