Davidson College student, Jane Gribble, was our March Mathness winner this year. Below she explains how she filled in her bracket.
I love basketball – Davidson College basketball. As a Davidson College cheerleader I have an enormous amount of school pride, especially when it comes to our basketball team. However, outside of Davidson College I know little to nothing about college basketball. I knew that UNC Chapel Hill was having a tough season because this is my sister’s alma mater. Also, I knew that New Mexico, Gonzaga, Duke, and Montana were all likely teams for the NCAA tournament because we had ...
Davidson math professor, PUP author and bracketology expert, Tim Chartier, discusses the math behind March Madness with the LA Times.
Mathematician Tim Chartier has the best job on Earth once a year: when the NCAA men’s basketball tournament begins, so does March Mathness.
His telephone rings, he’s on the radio, he’s talking to ESPN, and for once he can explain what exactly he does for a living at North Carolina’s Davidson College.
“For the first time in my life I can talk about what I’m doing, on a higher level, and people understand,” Chartier said.
What Chartier does is use complex math to win ...
After the Round of 32, Kyle Snipes was #1 on our leaderboard. Below he gives us an update on his bracket.
As the scores continued to roll in Friday and Saturday afternoon, I was left echoing the words of many bracketologists around the country- “Dang, thanks to ___________, my bracket is totally busted!” For me, FGCU, Oregon, and Ole Miss dealt the harshest blows. When the second round was said and done, my mathematical methods had correctly predicted 2 of the 10 first round upsets (lower seed over higher seed) while incorrectly predicting victories by Missouri and St. Mary’s over their ...
Maddie Parrish is senior Economics major with a Communications Studies concentration at Davidson College. She plays Division I field hockey.
March Madness. 65 elite NCAA Division I Basketball teams competing to win it all, the NCAA Tournament Championship. Every year fans from across the nation create brackets to predict who will ultimately be #1. I am one of those fans, and I’m excited to share my story. My name is Maddie Parrish and I am a senior Economics major with a Communication Studies concentration at Davidson College, a small, highly selective liberal arts school twenty minutes north of Charlotte, NC. We ...
Sportscaster-John Hussey
The first weekend of the NCAA tournament was as surprising as ever, with Florida Gulf Coast’s sweet 16 appearance topping the list. FGCU put the largest dent into my bracket knocking out Georgetown, which eliminated a team from the finals for me, essentially ending what chance I had at a good score. Even though the game was a big upset, it wasn’t “entirely” a shock. Going into the tourney, I knew that FGCU had a win over Miami on their resume and Georgetown’s Princeton offense makes them susceptible to low scoring games, which makes them vulnerable. There is a ...
John Hussey and Vickie Kearn both work at Princeton University Press. John is the assistant sales director and national accounts manager and Vickie is the mathematics editor. We thought it would be fun to see how they filled out their March Madness brackets. The conversation that follows took place on March 20 at our PUP offices. To get things started, we asked a single question: How did you fill out your bracket?
Vickie: You may have figured out I am the math geek. After getting my math degree at the University of Richmond, I taught math for 8 years and then ...
Don’t forget to join our ESPN bracket challenge group before Thursday, March 21st!
To learn more about March Mathness this year and to glean tips from years’ past, please visit the March Mathness site.
Use the widget below to explore Tim Chartier’s lectures on March Mathness and to find more advice on how to fill out your brackets this year.
But will these new mathematical models make sure my team is ranked higher? That is the truly important question.
For more on mathematical systems of ranking and rating, please see Who’s #1?: The Science of Rating and Ranking by Amy N. Langville & Carl D. Meyer. You might also want to peruse our March Mathness series of blog posts here where students put these mathematical models into action during March Madness. If your school is interested in participating in March Mathness next year, please contact PUP Math Editor Vickie Kearn.
March Mathness is over, so now it’s time to ask the key question: How did we do?
On March 15 many of us scrambled to complete our brackets and 64 of us placed them in the PUP March Mathness group of the ESPN Tourney Challenge. Almost everyone was in the top 50th percentile and 10 of our group did better than 90% of the 6.5 million people who entered a bracket. What we had in common was that we used a particular math algorithm or some combination to fill out our brackets. Quite a few of us also tossed in a ...
Ralph Abbey was a member of the PUP March Mathness ESPN group and completed his bracket in the 91.8 percentile which is a fantastic achievement. However, we’re already looking forward to 2013, so in this post, he shares a few tips for improving your bracket next tournament.
I am a PhD graduate student in mathematics at North Carolina State University. My adviser is Dr. Carl Meyer, coauthor of Who’s #1? While sports ranking isn’t my PhD topic, I do find it very interesting, and it is actually quite a good topic of conversation, even among non-math people.
It was less than ...
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