THE FOOTBALL

The ball at the heart of a global game.

Soccer is known as “the beautiful game.” The football—as most of the world calls it—can itself be quite elegant. There’s Telstar, the classic ball that’s made of 32 hexagonal and pentagonal panels, alternating black-and-white faces. More recent designs include Teamgeist—“team spirit” in German—the official football of the 2006 World Cup, played in Germany; its 14 swooping panels are eight hexagons and six squares. Jabulani—Zulu for “rejoice”—was created for South Africa’s 2010 World Cup; its eight panels are equally oval and hexagonal and give the ball its distinct and organic look. Ghys, a French mathematician who writes a column on math for Le Monde, studies all these footballs in his erudite and whimsical overview of the spherical object that commands the attention of billions of fans. In short and lively chapters accentuated by a variety of images, including colorful 3-D graphic models, Ghys breaks down the various football shapes, explaining the differences for the lay reader. He also gets into practical matters: As innovative as the Jabulani design was, for instance, athletes hated the ball: “They found that it followed unpredictable trajectories,” the author writes. Or, as Danish player Daniel Agger observed, “it makes us look like drunken sailors.” The design of the balls is complex enough that many have difficulty accurately depicting them. As an example, Ghys cites an English traffic sign that gets the standard Telstar design wrong (botching the number of sides). More than 22,000 people signed a petition to have the sign fixed. The government refused, writing in a terse (and very English) reply, “The purpose of a traffic sign is not to raise public appreciation and awareness of geometry.” Thankfully, Ghys is here to do just that.

A kick for fans and nonfans alike.