Average pace and horizontal chords

Abstract

We are motivated by a problem about running: If a race was completed in an average pace of P minutes per mile, is there necessarily some mile of the race that was run in exactly P minutes? The answer is no. We explain why, and describe the history of this celebrated problem, known as the Universal Chord Theorem. We also clarify and streamline the proof of a more powerful result by Heinz Hopf from 1937.