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Maths
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Doing a spot of algebra at Bondi beach should improve your body surfing technique - according to a professor at an international maths conference in Sydney today.
The title of Professor Neville de Mestre's presentation at the week-long International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics - being held at Sydney's Darling Harbour - was The Mathematics and Physics of Body Surfing.
Excellent. Someone was going to explain - one plus one equals two - how to body surf.
It would be a welcome break from the incomprehensible maths talkfest on in the other rooms.
How difficult could it be to understand? Waves come in, you count to three - the maths - and catch the wave's energy - the physics - to take you in to shore and make you look like a beach-bound legend.
At the back of about 60 of the 1,700 conference delegates who turned up for de Mestre's talk, it all started well. I was following de Mestre easily, at first - well, the body surfing videos at least - until, out of nowhere, the movies disappeared and were replaced with algebraic formulas.
I got one of the first graphs, the Y axis being the height of the wave and X being the time, creating a lovely wave-like effect on the chart, but it all turned to custard - for me - soon afterwards.
There were letters where I always thought numbers were supposed to be and phrases like "partial differential equations" were spoken, in seriousness, and applied to incoming waves. All the time while the random letters and unfathomable phrases gently floated way above my head, everyone else in the room seemed to be just nodding along.
By the time I came out of that algebra-induced hypnosis, de Mestre was talking about "turbulent breakers being quasi-steady." Bugger. I'd lost it in what was, admittedly as far as maths goes, a plain English presentation.
He explained quasi-steady as being waves that got gently smaller with time, but by then my brain had frozen.
It didn't thaw until De Mestre put up a slide of body surfing techniques. They included: head first - why you'd want to go in any other direction is beyond me - cornering, hydroplaining, corkscrewing, barrels and doubling.
The feet-first approach had actually been tried several times by de Mestre - all in the name of maths, of course - but he reported only making it about four or five metres each time. He said "the problem is getting up to the wave speed," but I suspect it has more to do with water up your nose.
By then the algebra had dissipated into casual mentions of how much research still had to be done into wave maths.
But for the numerically illiterate, de Mestre gave a tip in words.
If you're just starting out body surfing, he recommended that you should find a beach with a sand bank, stand on it and "try and launch yourself" onto a wave.
©The Sydney Morning Herald
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