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Original Articles

Random Walker Ranking for NCAA Division I-A Football

Thomas Callaghan Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4042 USA tscallag@stanford.edu
,
Peter J. Mucha Department of Mathematics & Institute for Advanced Materials, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3250 USA mucha@unc.edu
&
Mason A. Porter Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, The University of Oxford, 24-29 St. Giles', Oxford OX1 3LB, United Kingdom mason@its.caltech.edu
Pages 761-777 | Published online: 31 Jan 2018
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Notes on contributors

Thomas Callaghan

THOMAS CALLAGHAN is a graduate student in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. He is a 2005 graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he started this work as an REU project at a time when all three authors were in the School of Mathematics there. He won his girlfriend's heart after she used this ranking system to win a college football bowl game pool among her coworkers. A fan of many sports, he is an avid ultimate frisbee player, when he is not too busy with research or autographing the November 2004 ESPN: The Magazine in which this work was featured. He is the only coauthor here with a degree from a Division I-A football school.

Peter J. Mucha

PETER MUCHA is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and the Institute for Advanced Materials at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, he was an assistant professor in the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1998. While he greatly enjoys college football, as a graduate of Cornell University he is naturally a much bigger fan of college hockey, which manages to seed its annual sixteen-team postseason tournament by a committee decision that is almost wholly dictated algorithmically (see, for example, http://www.uscho.com).

Mason A. Porter

MASON PORTER recently moved across the pond to University of Oxford, taking up a position as a university lecturer in the Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and a tutorial fellow of Somerville College. From June 2005 through September 2007, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Center for the Physics of Information and the Department of Physics at California Institute of Technology. Prior to his 2005 return to his beloved alma mater (B.S., Applied Mathematics, 1998), which also brought him closer to his equally beloved Los Angeles Dodgers, he received a Ph.D. from the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University in 2002 and was a VIGRE Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech. He notes that Caltech's football team has gone undefeated since 1993 (when it was disbanded) and most of its existing teams tend to win very few games. While this article was in press, Caltech's men's basketball team won its first game in over 10 years and its women's basketball team won its first two games ever. The women's table tennis team, of which Mason was named the official mascot in 2007, was also very successful recently. Mason promises to bring his immense passion for baseball to Oxford. The times, they are achangin'.
 

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