“Can Math Skills Help You Fill Out an NCAA bracket?”

If you are a fan of the annual NCAA’s March Madness and want to be better at predicting the outcome of the final winners, stop by the Jennifer Leavitt Student Center’s multipurpose room on Tuesday, March 19 at 7 p.m., where USU Eastern math instructor Peter Legner, will discuss “Can Math Skills Help You Fill Out an NCAA bracket?”
The talk will use basic math and statistics formulas to show how to predict the outcome of future sporting events (not just NCAA basketball games).
The NCAA men’s basketball tournament begins the week of March 19. The math department is also sponsoring a “fill out the bracket” challenge for the NCAA tournament. All students are invited to fill out a tournament bracket and send their predictions to [email protected].
USU Eastern basketball coaches are also filling out their brackets and participating in the competition. See if you can beat the math formulas and the basketball coaches in predicting the outcome of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The top-two student brackets will win gift certificates for USU Eastern sportswear in the campus bookstore.
Legner has taught at USU-Eastern three years. He studied mathematics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and at the University of Idaho Moscow, Idaho. He also has deep interest in sports. He works as the official scorer for the Spokane Indians minor league baseball team during the summers. His talk will demonstrate how basic mathematical formulas taught in math 1050 and stats 1040 are used to predict the outcome of athletic competitions. An explanation of the success rates for these formulas will also be given.
Even if you are not a fan of math and statistics, this should be an interesting talk. The goal for the event is to motivate students to see an interesting application of mathematics in the real world.
The presentation is free and open to the public.