Big news this week was the record setting Wimbledon men’s singles match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, which took a record 11 hours 5 minutes to complete. The match is the longest men’s singles tennis match ever. It is more than twice as long as the next longest US Open match. But just how long was this match? I wanted to visualize this feat, so created a histogram of the men’s singles match times from this year’s Wimbledon (it looks clearer if you click on the image). How long do you think it will take to break this record?
Punk Rock Operations Research 
June 25th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
If you need an example of an “outlier” in a data set, I think this might just be perfect.
June 25th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
You read my mind! I already saved the information in my special teaching folder that contains real-world examples.
July 6th, 2010 at 1:49 am
The commentators kept saying that a game like this will never be seen again. If you have two players who each win 90% of their service points how many matches will you have to play before you get a 68-70 or more set?
July 14th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Don’t want to seem picky, but, not being a terribly quant-oriented person, aren’t histograms supposed to NOT have spaces in-between the columns? I know it’s and Excel bug. Any idea why MS hasn’t (won’t) fix it?
Great blog, BTW.
Henrique