RSSeNEWS to be determined...

Frank Duckworth, honorary editor of RSS NEWS, has received the MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. Frank and his colleague Tony Lewis received the award for services to cricket, being inventors of the Duckworth/Lewis method for resetting targets in rain interrupted one-day cricket matches.

Tony and Frank's collaboration on the method began following Frank’s presentation of a mathematical formula for target adjustment made in 1992 at the RSS international conference in Sheffield. The method was first used in 1997 and over the next two years spread to all cricketing nations. The game’s governing body, the International Cricket Council, adopted it as their official method in 1999 and it has been in worldwide use ever since. To date the Duckworth/Lewis method has been used in over 1200 matches.

The citations also refer to their services to mathematics and statistics, notably Frank’s voluntary work for the Society. He became honorary editor of RSS NEWS in April 1993, soon after taking early retirement from the nuclear power industry where he had worked as a research statistician. In 2004 he was awarded the Chambers medal for services to the Society. In 2005 he was the Society’s Schools (Guy) Lecturer and in 2006 he received the C Oswald George prize for the best article that year in Teaching Statistics, this constituting a write-up of his Guy Lecture.

His joint paper on the cricket method with Tony Lewis, published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society, received the Goodeve medal of that Society for the best paper of 1998. 

Interviewed on the BBC Today programme when the Honours list was announced on Saturday 12 June, Frank was asked for his reaction to receiving the honour. He said: "It's helped to demonstrate that mathematics and statistics isn't just a nasty subject you have to learn at school … it's a subject that's very useful in a wide range of applications, and particularly in sport in this instance."

A TV documentary on the history of one-day cricket, which features interviews with Frank and Tony at Errol Street, has been made for Sky Sports and is due to be broadcast later this summer.