Howard Brody, the world’s foremost physicist of tennis, who explored what happens when the stoppable force known as a ball meets the movable object called a racket, died on Aug. 11 in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 83.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his family said.
At his death an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he spent his entire career, Professor Brody began his professional life as a particle physicist before a chance encounter in the 1970s caused him to train his eye on tennis.
With the myriad potential variations in the materials used in a racket, the tension of its strings, the composition of the court surface and the construction of the ball, to say nothing of the speed, heft and angle of the player’s limbs, tennis is made for a physicist.