Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:
The medals keep coming for US swimmers at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris — and that’s in part thanks to science.
Several of the athletes on Team USA have improved their times dramatically in recent years, and some of these improvements could be down to Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Working for years with students who are on the university’s swimming team, Ono has developed techniques to monitor the fine movements of the body in the pool. He and his collaborator Jerry Lu, who is at the Sports Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, then create 3D models of the athletes and suggest tiny changes that can shave off precious fractions of a second at every stroke.
Ono, whose day job is studying problems in number theory, spoke with Nature from Paris, where he is supporting the swimming team.
More here.
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