Analyzing Wimbledon: New Book by Fellows Klaassen and Magnus
The game of tennis creates many assumptions that a statistician would like to analyze. Are new balls to serve with an advantage? Do real champions win the big points? Is it true that beginning to serve in a set gives an advantage?
In their book Analyzing Wimbledon. The Power of Statistics (Oxford University Press), TI Fellows Franc Klaassen and Jan Magnus formulated these questions and many more as ‘hypotheses’, tested these statistically and invalidated a number of these assumptions. Klaassen and Magnus used a dataset of nearly 100,000 points played over the years at Wimbledon and data of other tennis grand slam tournaments.
In Analyzing Wimbledon Klaassen and Magnus also use the power of statistical reasoning to discuss how the outcome of a match can be predicted, which points are important and which are not, how to choose an optimal service strategy, and whether a ‘winning mood’ actually exists in tennis. This book is relevant not only for people interested in tennis, mathematics and statistics, but also teaches us something about human behavior.
About the authors
Franc Klaasen is professor of international economic relations at the University of Amsterdam and director of MInt (Macroeconomics and International Economics Research Group). Jan Magnus is emeritus professor of econometrics at Tilburg University and visiting professor at the econometrics and operations research department of the VU Amsterdam.