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 ...
March Madness and, by extension, March Mathness are now over. This project was first and foremost a way to teach ratings and rankings at Davidson College and other schools. Now that it is all over, we’re checking back in with a few of the students to see if they will draw on their new math skills when they fill out their brackets next year.
Paul Britton
Overall, I was fairly happy with how my brackets performed this year. None of the brackets performed particularly well in the early stages, but both the Piecewise Massey bracket and my own observation bracket came on ...
In 2008, Davidson College seniors, Colin Stephenson and Neil Goodson, used math to fill in their bracket and ended up ranking in the 100th percentile at a rank position of 834 in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge. Read about their experience below.
Q: What class were you taking when you created your brackets? How did the idea of creating brackets with math algorithms arise?
Neil: The original research project came out of an elective course I took that focused on topics in operations research, which is an area of mathematics that focuses on the application of mathematics to solving complex problems in the real world problems. The class ...
Out of 6.5 million entries, the participants in the March Mathness group of the ESPN Tournament Challenge are doing very well. One third of our group is in the top 20%. Following are summaries from some of those in our group. They describe how they designed their brackets and how they are embracing the excitement of the tournament. The methods mentioned are described in the recently published Who’s #1? By Amy Langville and Carl Meyer.
Additional student reports here: http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2012/03/22/how-are-we-doing-checking-in-with-our-march-mathness-teams/
Bryan Kelley
Bryan Kelley is a sophomore Math major at Davidson College. He is from Rockland, Massachusetts. In the following, he describes ...
Out of 6.5 million entries, the participants in the March Mathness group of the ESPN Tournament Challenge are doing very well. One third of our group is in the top 20%. Following are summaries from some of those in our group. They describe how they designed their brackets and how they are embracing the excitement of the tournament. The methods mentioned are described in the recently published Who’s #1? By Amy Langville and Carl Meyer.
More reports from our student teams: http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2012/03/23/more-from-our-leaderboard-students-describe-their-march-mathness-brackets/
Calley Anderson
Calley Anderson is a sophomore English Major with a Film and Media Studies Concentration at Davidson College. She is ...
Greg Newman is currently at the top of the March Mathness ESPN Tournament Challenge leaderboard with two separate brackets and is ranked 131,052 out of 6.5 million brackets. That means that only 2% are doing better than he is. Greg is a senior Political Science major at Davidson College who spends a lot of time working on Computer Science/Mathematics. Last summer he interned at ESPN and he continues to work for them while in school. We asked him to describe how he picked his brackets this year.
Greg Newman on his “picks” for March Mathness
I think I would fall into a ...
The Davidson Wildcats beat Western Carolina 93-91 in the Southern Conference Tournament on March 5 and received an automatic bid to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. The following interview between Vickie Kearn (VK), Princeton’s math editor and Men’s Basketball coach, Bob McKillop (Coach), reveals what lies ahead for them in March Madness and how getting a high ranking after the tournament helps in recruiting new players.
Vickie Kearn: Congratulations on winning the Southern Conference Championship. It was a fantastic finish. What is the pressure like having to win in double overtime?
Coach McKillop: The experience of what we just did is draining ...
Inside Science Television spoke with Tim Chartier about how math can be used to predict the winners of March Mathness. They also provide additional resources for those who wish to learn more or teach this in their classrooms.
Tim notes in the interview that: “To do well in bracketology, you need to know how teams will do earlier. It’s often those teams that are very difficult to predict and those games that often our methods are picking up.”
He also reveals that, using data available at the time of the interview, his methods currently predict Kentucky will be the winner. Does that ...
