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Cricket-Duckworth, co-creator of DLS approach, passes away aged 84

Frank Duckworth, the pioneering statistician who cocreated the Duckworth Lewis approach embraced in cricket to revise targets in restricted overs video games truncated due to rain, died recently at the age of 84, the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) stated on Tuesday.

Duckworth and Tony Lewis produced the well-known technique which was adopted by the International Cricket Council in 1999. It was commonly used in one-day internationals and later on in T20 matches.

Fellows will be unfortunate to discover that Frank Duckworth passed away on 21 June 2024, at the age of 84, the RSS stated in a declaration.

Frank will be remembered mainly 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 discussed how Duckworth provided a paper called A fair lead to foul weather at its conference in 1992 where he proposed a formula for target correction in rain-interrupted matches.

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 Duckworth-Lewis method was later on renamed the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern

(source: Reuters)