How many students Beat the Geek?
The winner of the Beat the Geek Competition, hosted by Peter Legner of the math department, was Jennifer Burdis. She received 74 points (39 of 63 correct predictions) and was the only one of the 80 students who correctly picked the final game to be Louisville versus Michigan. Burdis also correctly picked Louisville to win. David Blackwell received 73 points to finish in second place. Burdis gets a $50 gift certificate to the bookstore while Blackwell receives a $25 gift certificate.
The winner of the Beat the Geek Competition, hosted by Peter Legner of the math department, was Jennifer Burdis. She received 74 points (39 of 63 correct predictions) and was the only one of the 80 students who correctly picked the final game to be Louisville versus Michigan. Burdis also correctly picked Louisville to win. David Blackwell received 73 points to finish in second place. Burdis gets a $50 gift certificate to the bookstore while Blackwell receives a $25 gift certificate.
According to Legner, 80 students participated in the contest where students used mathematic and statistic skills to predict the winner of March Madness. Each student filled out the bracket challenge for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and emailed them to Legner before March 19. Nine students “Beat the Geek” and finished with a higher score than Legner.
“My bracket finished in the top 90 percentile on Yahoo (national contest), but I finished lower than the 90 percentile for the campus. Students performed better than the national average,” he said.
Did Legner’s lecture called “Can Math Skills Help Fill Out an NCAA Bracket” work for Burdis. She told Legner that she made her picks by having her daughter flip a coin. When he told her that the probability of picking the correct two teams for the final by flipping a coin was astronomical, she admitted that she switched a few that had the much worse seed beating a higher seed. But she said that she did not change that many.
