Given once, 2025
An Introduction to Tournaments
A first look at tournaments, where every pair plays exactly once and one of them wins
An introductory survey, for graduate students and up.
Abstract
Draft, not yet checked by meIn a round-robin competition every pair of players meets once and one of them wins; recording the results gives a tournament, a complete graph with a direction on every edge. I introduce tournaments as objects of study in their own right and as models of competitions and pairwise comparisons, and look at a question they naturally raise: given the results, who deserves to be called a winner?
The slides
The slides for this one are not online.