How much does Tiger Woods dominate professional golf?

An expert has found out how good Tiger Woods is in his profession - number-wise.

"In 2008, for example, Tiger computes to being 2.65 strokes per round better than the average," says Roland Minton, the professor of mathematics at Roanoke College in Salem, Va. "He rates 1.4 stokes per round better than any other golfer on tour. Over four rounds of a tournament, this predicts that Tiger wins by at least 5.6 strokes."

Minton, the author of a forthcoming book on the mathematics of golf, has analyzed data from the PGA Tour's ShotLink System, which records the location of every shot with qualitative information (rough or not, uphill or not) and quantitative information (such as distance to the hole, within an inch).

The data includes the 1.2 million shots per year taken at Tour events between 2004-2008, excluding the four "majors" not run by the tour.