Tributes paid to DLS method co-creator Frank Duckworth

FRANK DUCKWORTH , the pioneering statistician who co-created the Duckworth Lewis method adopted in cricket to revise targets in limited overs games truncated due to rain, died last week at the age of 84, the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) said on Tuesday (25).

Duckworth and Tony Lewis created the famous method which was adopted by the International Cricket Council in 1999. It was widely used in one-day internationals and later in T20 matches.

"Fellows will be sad to learn that Frank Duckworth passed away on 21 June 2024, at the age of 84," the RSS said in a statement.

"Frank will be remembered largely for his contributions to the Society as editor of RSS NEWS, and to cricket as the co-inventor of the Duckworth Lewis method."

The RSS explained how Duckworth presented a paper called "A fair result in foul weather" at its conference in 1992 where he proposed a formula for target correction in rain-interrupted matches.

The paper was directly inspired by the farcical ending to the 1992 World Cup semi-final between England and South Africa in Australia, when a short spell of rain played havoc with calculations and left South Africa targeting an impossible 22 runs off one ball.

Duckworth then worked with Lewis, who was a mathematics lecturer at the University of the West of England, to come up with the formula. Lewis died in 2020 aged 78. The pair worked together on a formula that was first used in the second match of England's one-day series against Zimbabwe in 1999.

The Duckworth-Lewis method was later renamed the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern (DLS) method in 2014 after Australian statistician Steven Stern made some modifications.