Speakers
Guest Lecture with David Sumpter, Professor & Author
It wasn’t long after applied mathematics professor, David Sumpter, published his first book Soccermatics in 2016, until football clubs across the world started to contact him. Eager to find an edge over their opponents, they wanted to know how they could use maths to, for example, scout hidden gems in lesser-known leagues, find weak points in the opposition, and improve their defensive structure. David has worked with both small and big teams across the world, including England, Ajax, Barcelona, Hammarby in Sweden and several Premier League clubs (who prefer to remain secret). Recently, the company he co-founded, Twelve Football have built Twelve GPT — a model incorporating David and the other data scientists he works with knowledge of the game – which allows everyone, from fans to board members, to gain insights into football using data
Professor David Sumpter is author of Four Ways of Thinking (2023), The Ten Equations that Rule the World (2020), Outnumbered (2018), Collective Animal Behaviour (2010) and Soccermatics (2016). His research work, including more than 100 scientific articles, covers everything from the inner workings of fish schools and ant colonies, through social psychology and segregation in society, to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
David has consulted for leading football clubs and national teams. He works actively with outreach to schools, industry and the social sector. His talks at Google, TedX, the Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture and The Royal Institution are available online. He has featured in documentaries for Amazon Prime and written for The Economist 1843, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The I-Paper, The Conversation, Prospect, Mathematics Today, Barcelona Innovation Hub and FourFourTwo magazine.