In 2014, an Emory student majoring in physics and math was also a walk-on member of the school's swim team. Andrew Wilson got interested in using math to improve his swimming, and won the national collegiate swimming championship in 2016, and went on to earn a gold medal at the 2021 Olympics. His math professor who collaborated on Wilson's project, Ken Ono, is a technical consultant for the 2024 US Olympic swimming team. Ono is now with the University of Virginia, which sent a record number of swimmers to the US women's swimming team in both 2021 and 2024.
Ono studies the data on talented swimmers, and applies Newton’s laws of motion to calculate acceleration, deceleration, and drag, and designs ways to improve all three to optimize a swimmer's speed through the water. Ono talked with Quanta magazine to explain how this project began, what data they analyze, and how physics can be used to improve a swimmer's performance. Read it, and then when the Paris Olympics swimming competitions begin on July 27, we'll see how UVA swimmers fare against the rest of the world. -via Real Clear Science
(Image credit: Jorge mello ej)
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