Cole Manschot
October 14, 2015
By Emma Alexander, Honors Communications Intern
It is always so refreshing to meet someone who is so passionate about what they are doing, and the moment I got Cole Manschot talking about his research I discovered just that. Cole is someone who really loves what he does. A senior from Wheaton, Illinois, Cole will be graduating in the spring with quite a few majors and minors. His majors include mathematics, statistics, and operations research, and his minors include Spanish, economics, and studio art and design. Needless to say, Cole has been busy. However, he is involved which many more exciting projects and activities outside of his school work.
One additional way in which Cole has been involved at Purdue is by conducting research in the area of sports science. More specifically, he is working with a matrix ranking system for football teams called the Colley Matrix Method. “This method does not account for the score of the game or the day and time at which it played,” Cole explains. Instead, the method compares who has beat who, and how difficult each of those wins was, based on the other teams that the losing team has previously defeated. So, for instance, if Purdue were to beat the number one ranked school, that win would be more meaningful, more “challenging”, in terms of how the victory would affect Purdue’s overall rank using the Colley Matric Method.
This method was previously being actively utilized to assist in college football rankings; however, it has since ceased being used on such a large scale. Some of the goals of Cole’s project are to determine why an initial transformation added by the original developer was necessary to the success and reliability of the method as well as how the method can be used to rank teams in a consistent, reliable way without the use of the original transformation.
Cole says it has also been very exciting to apply the things he has been learning in math to other relevant interests such as sports. He has enjoyed learning more and gaining a deeper understanding of how and why teams are ranked, something that he can see the relevance of in his day to day life.
Although the end of his project is very open ended, Cole says he would enjoy continuing similar research, perhaps on even better ways to rank teams. After all, he says, “Everyone wants to find that one method where you can predict the winner every time.” Whether or not that will happen remains uncertain, but in the meantime Cole enjoys the bragging rights that come with begin able to predict game winners and use his other passions and interests to do it.
On top of all of this, however, Cole is also a scholarship nominee for Purdue. Cole says he is interested in potentially pursuing a career in athletics, fitness, or health. If he is granted the opportunity to attend graduate school by receiving one of these prestigious awards, he plans to study epidemiology and statistics. To read more about Cole’s experience with NISO and the application process for these awards check out our article on this year’s NISO Week.
