This week on Wednesday at 5:30 in LGRT1634, Prof. Turkington will speak; his talk is titled “Predicting the record times in rowing” (abstract below). As always, we’ll be providing pizza and soda. This talk was chosen especially to focus on basic modeling and applied math, so if you think you might be interested in those topics, please come!
Abstract:
How much faster is a 4-man boat than a 2-man
boat in Olympic rowing? Is there a mathematical
model that predicts the record times for single, 2-man,
4-man and 8-man rowing sculls? In this talk I will
show how to explain the data with a very simple model,
mostly based on scaling and dimensional analysis.
If there is time, I will mention some other problems
that can be handled in a similar way.