There are more than nine quintillion (9 x 1018) ways to fill out a 64-team March Madness bracket — and almost 150 quintillion permutations for the 68 college basketball teams in this year’s men’s tournament of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
The Princeton University Press March Mathness blog includes interviews of sports rankings experts, coaches, and mathematicians. Their predictions take the power of mathematical methods of rating and ranking, and bring them to bear on the NCAA hoops tournaments. The blog will also provide updates on the group’s collective performance, and the best method for picking the winner.
Blog posts, which date back to March, 2011, have described how math is used during tournaments, as detailed in Princeton University Press books such as Mathletics: How Gamblers, Managers, and Sports Enthusiasts Use Mathematics in Baseball, Basketball, and Football by Wayne Winston and Amy Langville and Carl Meyer’s Who’s #1? [Thanks to the Math Forum for putting this information in their weekly newsletter!]
There are all sorts of ways people fill out their brackets. Google has filled out a bracket based on search volume http://www.google.com/insidesearch/collegebasketball.html. Check back often to see how they’re doing.
We’ve blogged about the integration of math and sports in the past, too – check them out at http://msms.ehe.osu.edu/category/sports/.
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