INTRODUCTION

The analysis of a golf ball in flight has been the subject of many papers, with some of the earliest being by famous scientists such as P.G. Tait [Tai-96] [Kno-11] and J. J. Thompson [Tho-10], who happened to be keen golfers. Tait's investigation into the flight of a golf ball was probably the earliest serious study and folklore has it that this was initiated by the feat of his son, F.G. Tait who, in 1895, managed to drive 295 yards on the Old Course at St. Andrews. Now Tait was one of the foremost mathematical physicists of the time, but was unable to explain this prodigious drive by the then current theory. This spurred him on to make a detailed analysis of golf ball dynamics, including the devising of some innovative experiments whereby he had golfers drive golf balls into wet clay so he could determine the initial flight and spin of the ball. He recorded his experiments thus:

There were no high speed cameras at that time!

Inevitably Tait's analysis entailed some simplifying assumptions in relation to drag and lift as very little data was available then. These assumptions enabled Tait to obtain a closed form solution to the golf ball trajectory problem, which he used to generate the interesting set of hand drawings included in Fig. 9.1. Parts of this figure were included in Tait's article, “Golf—Long Driving,” published in the March 1896 edition of Badminton Magazine. Since this early research there has been a plethora of papers analyzing all aspects of the subject. In this chapter we shall present a more general analysis, illustrated by results from a numerical computer simulation, which demonstrate that Tait's approximate solutions, as represented by his excellent drawings, reproduced the main features of a golf ball trajectory.