Game, Set, Math! Wimbledon Facts and Puzzles to Keep Brains Busy

Game, Set, Math! Wimbledon Facts and Puzzles to Keep Brains Busy

Strawberries and cream, crisp white clothing and green grass courts can only mean one thing - Wimbledon is back.  

Yes, the oldest tennis tournament in the world returns this year for 2024 and as with every sport, there’s plenty of math 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?

There are 60 minutes in an hour, so you would multiply 60 by 11 to find how many minutes are in 11 hours - and don't forget to add on the extra 5 minutes to get your final answer: 665. 
Find out more about time

How many strawberries?

Roughly 61,700 lbs of strawberries are sold during the two weeks of the championship.

If the average car weighs 3,000lbs, how many car weight's worth of strawberries are sold? 

Answer: 61,700 divided by 3,000 is 20.5, so we can say that the amount of strawberries sold at Wimbledon is heavier than 20 cars combined!

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?

Answer: Divide 130 by 5, and then multiply this by 8 to get your answer: 208 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 40 feet of string, how many feet of string will be used altogether? 

Answer: 40 x 5,000 = 200,000 This gives you your answer in inches, so you need to divide by 12 to get your answer in feet: 16,666 feet. 

In case of showers...

The $96.6m retractable roof over Wimbledon's Centre Court is a wonder of math 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?

There are 60 seconds in a minute, and it takes 10 minutes, so multiply 60 x 10 = 600 seconds for the Centre Court 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're told that there are 31 rectangles altogether. If you can find them all, please let us know!


We hope you enjoyed this trip through the math of Wimbledon - remember to keep finding the math in the world around you! 

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