Statistical physics algorithm helps basketball fans fill out NCAA bracket
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - 08:31
in Mathematics & Economics
(Phys.org) —Back in the early 2000s, Ed Feng was a Ph.D. student at Stanford studying chemical engineering. At the time, he never thought that his research on the dynamics of liquids using statistical physics would one day lead to an algorithm that ranks sports teams. Yet now, more than a decade later, he's running a website devoted to sports analytics based on statistical physics that works much in the same way as Google's PageRank algorithm works for ranking websites.