Content about “

mathematics in sport

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England may have bombed out, but the Euro 2016 Championships are still in full swing. Here are some articles by our favourite football expert, Ken Bray

What's the best spot to aim a penalty at?

Marcus du Sautoy talks about football, cryptography, and numbers.

In the first part of this article we let maths set the scene for a free kick. Now we continue the drama, tracing the trajectory of the ball throughout the milliseconds it takes it to reach the goal line.

Free kicks will deliver much of the drama in the football world cup this summer. But how should strikers approach them and how does the design on the ball impact on its behaviour in flight? Maths can give us answers...

Andy Murray and Laura Robson made a good team at London 2012, bringing home silver in the mixed doubles. But how do you make sure that the competing pair is the best you can pick from the team?

London 2012 vowed to be the cleanest Olympics ever, with more than 6,000 tests on athletes for performance enhancing drugs. But when an athlete does fail a drug test can we really conclude that they are cheating? John Haigh does the maths.

Predicting the final Olympic medal count is a black art. Sport, with all its intricacies and vagaries, is always susceptible to variations in form, weather conditions and simple random events. But we like a challenge! So without further ado, here is our predicted 2012 London Olympic medal count.

In our article Mapping the medals we came up with our very own prediction of the 2012 Olympic medal counts for the top 20 countries! This interactive map tells you how our predictions stack up: click on a country to see its actual medal count, our prediction and the results from 2008.

Remember Frank Lampard's disallowed goal in the 2010 World Cup match against Germany? The ball hit the crossbar, landed well behind the line but then bounced out again. And it all happened too quickly for the ref to spot it was a goal. How these kind of (non)-goals happen and what can we do about them?

Horses, like all animals, have a number of different gaits. But how can they perform these complicated leg movements without having to stop and think? And why do they switch to a new gait when they want to go faster? Mathematics can shed some light on these questions.