Tributes paid to the Lancashire man Frank Duckworth from Lytham who help revoluntise cricket

The Lytham-born statistician co-created the Duckworth-Lewis method, a model to recalculate scores when limited-over matches were cut short by bad weather, with fellow Lancastrian Tony Lewis.

From the former King Edward VII School, now AKS, Duckworth graduated from the University of Liverpool and spent his entire career working in the nuclear industry.

He was originally employed as a metallurgist and found he had an ability to extract useful information from masses of numerical measurements.

A course in statistics followed and he later became a statistician, being elected as a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1974.

At the society's conference in 1992, he presented a short paper which proposed a formula for target correction in rain interrupted one-day cricket matches.

This led him to meet Lewis, a mathematics lecturer who grew up in Bolton and attended Kirkham Grammar School, who suggested an analysis of one-day score sheets based on Duckworth's proposed formula.

Duckworth received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath in 2015.

In the citation, it said he had been as important to the nuclear industry as he had been to cricket: "He came to realise the importance of statistics, not just to ensure reactor safety but also to assure the public that the reactors are safe.

"At that time, there were no statisticians working at the laboratories, so he set about making himself into a statistician.

"Then he had to convince his colleagues and others of the power of statistics, and spreading that idea has been at the core of everything he has done since.

"Persuading the cricket administrators that statistics could help them was just another example of that."

Announcing Duckworth's death, fellow statistician Rob Eastaway said he had been "a very genial man" who was "proud" of the method, despite it leaving casual fans somewhat flummoxed.

Mr Eastaway said while the statistician had been a powerhouse when it came to numbers, he also had a lighter side.

"When Tony Lewis died in 2020, he phoned to tell me that people thought he was already dead," he told the BBC. "They were like a comedy double act. Lewis was the straight man and Frank was very jovial."