VT Math Alum Kenneth Massey, producer of the Massey Ratings - a component of the BCS for 15 years, will visit Virginia Tech on Friday, January 31st.  His talk, entitled Spring Forward: Sorting Teams with Robins and Brackets will be at 4 pm in McBryde 129. Historically, Lewis Carroll wrote about rankings and bracketology in the 1880's.  Many in the modern day analytics community are introduced to the subject by the still perplexing problem of composing rankings.  Kenneth will review some of the historical methodology, and embrace some of the challenges inherent to the task. He will discuss the challenges and methods of composing college and professional sports rankings. 

Kenneth Massey produces the Massey Ratings, which provide objective team evaluation for professional and amateur sports. His college football ratings were a component of the Bowl Championship Series for 15 years.  Massey is also a partner with Edj Analytics, and serves as a math professor and data scientist for Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, TN, where he lives with his wife and 2+ children. Massey did graduate research at Virginia Tech in the field of numerical linear algebra.

His talk is the third this year from a sports data analyst and is hosted by the newly formed Sports Data Analytics Club at Virginia Tech and sponsored the Mathematics Department &  Computational Modeling and Data Analytics (CMDA).  The talk is free and open to the public.

Keep an eye on the Math Calendar for more activites from this and other Math related clubs!

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