A Math Professor Turns Better Brackets Into Homework

As a teacher, Tim Chartier’s main goal is to get his students at Davidson College and the broader public more engaged in math. One of the most effective tools in the professor’s arsenal in recent years has been his phenomenally accurate system for predicting the National College Athletic Association tournament. It started out as a homework assignment for his students, but the results were so good that he turned it into an area of research. His bracket predictions have reached the 99th percentile in pools with millions of people.

You can see some of Chartier’s work on the Davidson website. Click on the Massey Rating section and then click on the interval approach, which breaks up the college basketball season into smaller parts and lets you adjust the importance of each part. A win in March, for example, should probably matter more than a win in December. If you believe the end of the year matters three times more than the beginning of the year, you can put in that exact weighting. Davidson and his team of student researchers have found that the best predictive abilities came by breaking the season down into eight intervals.