Question: NCAA’s basketball championships are knows as “March Madness” (where NSU’s men’s basketball team is the defending NCAA Division II national champions.) In 2014, there was a contest where a billion dollars was offered as a prize for predicting the results of all 63 division one men’s basketball games as a “perfect bracket” where predictions on the winners of all 63 games had to be made before the start of the first game. A hotly debated topic at the time was “What is the probability of predicting a perfect bracket?”
Find an upper bound on this probability which is equivalent to probability of correctly predicting the outcomes (head or tails) on 63 consecutive fair coin flips.
Show Answer ▼
One-half to the power of 63, which is approximately 1 in 9.2 quintillion.
“Math Corner” is a contest that appears in each issue of The Current and is a collaboration between NSU’s Department of Mathematics | NSU Halmos College of Arts and Sciences | NSU and NSU’s Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts | Halmos College of Arts and Sciences | NSU. Contest submissions to the Math Corner question in the Current’s latest issue can be sent to jgershma@nova.edu up until the date the next issue is published. Prizes are awarded at the end of the academic year.
Be the first to comment on "Math Corner: Perfectly Probable"