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How Do You Make a Ball?

... with great difficulty. Making something perfectly round is harder than you think.

Take a football. A thousand years ago, footballs were really rubbish. They were just pigs' bladders that had been blown up like balloons. They weren't very round, so when you kicked one, you had no control of where it would go. (By the way, the pig-bladder balls had to be blown up by mouth while the bladder was still warm and very yucky - it wasn't a job many people were keen on!).

So what's all this got to do with maths?

Well, it was mathematics that gave us the modern football. In 1970, Adidas launched the famous Telstar ball - you know, the one with the black and white panels.

The beauty of the Telstar is its shape. It's made of 32 panels: 12 black pentagons, and 20 white hexagons. This mix of hexagons and pentagons is a brilliant way of creating a round object from flat panels. It's got a lovely mathematical name:

the "truncated icosahedron"

(try that on your teacher - she'll be very impressed!).

Thanks to the Telstar, football got fancier. With these new round balls, top players soon mastered the ability to make footballs swerve and dip - paving the way for legends like David Beckham, who adds topspin and sidespin to his free kicks. Just try doing that with a wobbly pigs' bladder!

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