Reliability – Maths Paper Published

TISB Grade 12 student, Vishnu, recently got a research paper published in the SIAM Undergraduate Research Online publication (SIURO). SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) is the world’s largest professional association devoted to applied mathematics, and Vishnu is the first Indian high school student and the third from an Indian educational institution to be published in the SIURO. This makes TISB the third Indian institution to be represented in the publication. To celebrate this, we got in touch with Vishnu to find out more about his paper and what this means for the future.

I’m satisfied with having wonderful conversations with passionate people about mathematics and computer science – changing the world is not and realistically will never be on my agenda – Vishnu, Grade 12

Other than being published in the SIURO Volume 14, the paper was also nominated for the Pioneer Research Journal, and Vishnu got outstanding feedback from Dr Mark Glickman of Harvard and Dr David Gleich of Purdue for his presentation at the Midwest Sports Analytics Meeting.

“I was really interested in fusing ideas from various areas of computer science and inventing various metrics to measure reliability, grounding it within mathematics”, says Vishnu who wrote the paper during the 2020 summer vacation, sitting at home while interacting with Professor Tim Chartier whom he had met through the Pioneer Research Program. “The paper investigates the ‘reliability’ of tournament rankings while investigating its relationship with ‘competitive balance’, a metric that measures spread in the abilities of the competitors”, says Vishnu and explains that reliability is an incredibly intuitive idea, but that it is hard to quantify it while analysing rankings produced from a tournament. As a result of this paper and their conversations, Professor Chartier’s has conducted work and have opened many additional questions regarding ranking and tournament structures.

After 10 weeks of program learning, Vishnu invented a metric called ‘reliability’; looking at tournament rankings while investigating its relationship with different structures of tournaments. Using Monte-Carlo analysis, Vishnu wrote a research paper to explain the relationship – applying additional metrics and methods from other areas of study. The paper has a wide audience, including academics (especially mathematicians interested in ranking), programmers designing comparative systems, video game designers, sports analysts, and tournament organisers. “This opens up a ton of opportunities for further research. As a published author in ranking, I can assist sports teams, firms, or tournament organisers with insights from my work”, says Vishnu who has already been contacted by Dr Amy Langville – an expert in ranking – who he hopes to work with during his first term at university.

Being very humble about his success and publication Vishnu echos the sentiments of G. H. Hardy, one of the greatest mathematicians in the world and one of his heroes: “I know that no discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world”. However, because Vishnu finds ranking interesting along with other areas within applied mathematics and theoretical computer science, who knows what the reliability of the future may hold.

Want to find out more? Read Vishnu’s paper in the SIURO Volume 14