Undergraduate Math Conference
Saturday, April 5, 2014
2014 Invited Speaker - Professor Tim Chartier
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Biography: Tim Chartier is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Davidson College. In 2014, he was named the inaugural Mathematical Association of America's Math Ambassador. He is a recipient of a national teaching award from the Mathematical Association of America. Published by Princeton University Press, Tim coauthored Numerical Methods: Design, Analysis, and Computer Implementation of Algorithms with Anne Greenbaum. As a researcher, Tim has worked with both Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories and his research was recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He serves on the Editorial Board for Math Horizons, a mathematics magazine of the Mathematical Association of America. He chairs the Advisory Council for the Museum of Mathematics, which opened in 2012 and is the first museum of mathematics in the United States. Tim has been a resource for a variety of media inquiries which includes fielding mathematical questions for the Sports Science program on ESPN. He also writes for the Science blog of the Huffington Post.
Sports ranking March Madness to Twitter Abstract: In the past decade ranking methods have been used for a variety of applications from the web to ecological systems to sports teams. This talk will discuss the Massey and Colley methods, which are two of the six computer ranking methods factored into NCAA College Football's BCS rankings that are used to determine which teams are invited to play in which bowl games. Both methods compute a ranking by solving a linear system of equations and can be applied to a large variety of sports. In this talk, we will introduce the integration of nonuniform weighting for these methods. Further, we will explore challenges in using PageRank, the very successful method of Google for ranking webpages. We will discuss how such methods can produce brackets for the Division I NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament also known as March Madness. Finally, we will discuss recent work that adapts sports ranking methods to social networks such as Twitter. |
2013 Undergraduate Math Conference 2012 Undergraduate Math Conference 2011 Undergraduate Math 2010 Undergraduate Math Conference 2008 Undergraduate Math Conference 2007 Undergraduate Math Conference Ayres Hall is home to the UT Department of Mathematics. |
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Funding for the Undergraduate Math Conference is provided by NSF grant DMS-0846477 through the MAA Regional Undergraduate Mathematics Conferences program, www.maa.org/RUMC and the
University of Tennessee Mathematics Department.