Game, set, maths! Wimbledon facts and puzzles to keep brains busy
Strawberries and cream, crisp whites, and crowds of people on Murray Mound (or is it Henman Hill?) can only mean one thing - Wimbledon.
Yes, the oldest tennis tournament in the world is underway again, and as with every sport, there’s plenty of maths to be found. Read on for some Championship challenges!
The longest match
The longest match ever took three days to play - 11 hours and 5 minutes in total. The exhausting nail-biter was played in 2010 between John Isner from the USA and Nicolas Mahut from France (pictured above with the final scoreboard from their match).
Can you figure out how many minutes the match took altogether?
How many strawberries?
Roughly 27,000kg of strawberries are sold during the two weeks of the championship.
If the average car weighs 1,300 kg, how many car weight's worth of strawberries are sold?
Speedy serves
The record for the fastest serve is 148mph (Taylor Dent) and the fastest serve in the ladies section is 130mph (Venus Williams)
If 5 miles = 8 kilometres, how fast is Venus' serve in kmph?
It's a string thing
The Wimbledon stringing team expects to re-string over 5,000 rackets this year.
If each racket on average requires 12 metres of string, how many km of string will be used altogether?
In case of showers...
The £70m retractable roof over Wimbledon's Centre Court is a wonder of maths and geometry in itself. When rain starts to fall, the roof takes 10 minutes to close fully.
How many seconds does it take for the roof to close?
Just for fun
How many rectangles can you find in this diagram of a tennis court? Be careful - you can combine smaller rectangles to make larger ones.
We hope you enjoyed this trip through the maths of Wimbledon - remember to keep finding the maths in the world around you!
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