Come the middle of March, a remotely curious college-hoops observer, innocently typing “March Madness” into Google, encounters a swarm of numbers related to the N.C.A.A.’s annual basketball tournament. Just a few days ago, ESPN.com published an eight-thousand-word story titled “Numbers to Know for All 68 Tourney Teams.” (The second-seeded Louisville, for example, is paired with the number five: “The past five times Louisville has played a game anywhere except the KFC Yum! Center, the Cardinals have failed to win the game in 40 minutes,” the story explains, referring to Louisville’s home court.) CBS Sports and others have offered their own exhaustive numerical guides to the tournament, full of statistical runes for susceptible bracket-fillers. “2008,” CBS explains, was “the last time a Pac-12 team made the final four.” Do with that knowledge what you will.
Ken Ono, a professor of mathematics at Emory University and the author of “The Web of Modularity: Arithmetic of the Coefficients of Modular Forms and Q-series,” is an avid basketball fan who, as his day job, specializes in number theory. (The Wisconsin Badgers and the Duke Blue Devils are his co-favorite college-hoops teams.) Ono, too, is amused by the published profusion of “important numbers” related to college basketball’s climactic tournament, as well as the frequently thin theories attached—by authors, readers, or both—to their importance. Ono has playfully decided that, this year, “the most interesting number in the entire field is seventy-nine.”
“It is the seventy-ninth edition of the madness,” Ono explained recently. “But the number seventy-nine is significant for many other reasons.” Mathematically, seventy-nine is a prime number, divisible only by one and itself. It’s also an “emirp,” the term for a prime number that remains prime when its digits are reversed, as in ninety-seven. (Seventy-three—the Golden State Warriors’ record-breaking number of regular season wins in the N.B.A. last year—is an emirp as well. Emirp is “prime” spelled backwards.)
Seventy-nine is also what number theorists, who spend perhaps a little too much time alone in their studies, have come to call a “sexy prime.” Whereas the slightly more commonly known “twin prime” is a prime number separated from another prime by two—as in three and five—a sexy prime is a prime number that is separated from its prime partner by six. So, why “sexy”? Ono explained: “In Latin, six is ‘sex.’ ” Of course. Seventy-nine’s sexy-prime pairing is the smaller prime seventy-three—or, as we may now call it, the “Golden State Prime.”
Are there still more ways in which seventy-nine excites the especially mathematical mind? “Yes,” Ono said. “It’s also a ‘golden number,’ since the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom of gold—the element’s so-called atomic number—is, you guessed it, seventy-nine.”
The number seventy-nine is also significant, in a more widely appreciable basketball sense, as it relates to the four top seeds in the tournament. Until last year, the defending champion Villanova was perhaps best known for its “perfect game,” on April Fools’ night, 1985, when the eighth-seeded Wildcats defeated the overwhelming tournament favorite, Georgetown University, a team led by the N.B.A.-bound senior center Patrick Ewing, 66–64. Rollie Massimino’s Wildcats shot a record-setting percentage in the game: seventy-nine per cent. (Well, 78.6.) This year, as the top seed in the East, the Wildcats could win the tournament again with a shooting percentage far below that number.
On the South side of the bracket, the University of North Carolina’s hall-of-fame coach, Roy Williams, has a career record of 810–216 as head coach—counting both high school and college games—which equates to winning 78.9 per cent of the games he’s skippered, or nearly four out of every five. To win the N.C.A.A. tournament for a third time, he’ll have to win six games in a row.
Meanwhile, the Midwest’s top seed, the perennial powerhouse University of Kansas Jayhawks, won its hundredth N.C.A.A. tournament game last year by scoring seventy-nine points in a third-round victory over the University of Maryland, 79–63, before losing its elite eight matchup against Villanova, which tipped off at 7:49 in the evening. (As ESPN.com noted in its numerical preview of the tournament, the sixth-seeded Maryland’s star junior, Melo Trimble, has been present for seventy-nine wins in his past three seasons at the school.)
Finally, Gonzaga University, the little Catholic school in Spokane, Washington, with an oddly impressive basketball program, earned the top seed in the tournament’s West quadrant this year, with a 32–1 record. Its only blemish: a 79–71 loss to Brigham Young University. (B.Y.U., too, has a relationship to the number in question: in 2012, a Pew Research Center survey determined that seventy-nine per cent of Mormons believe that sex between unmarried adults is morally wrong.)
“In view of these ‘meaningless’ facts, let me make a prediction,” Ono said, after considering them in their totality. “Villanova for the win!” Despite his confidence, Ono did not fill out a tournament bracket this year. He’s been too busy dealing with an actual time-sucking phenomenon. “I’ve got a new theorem related to black-hole physics that you may hear about in a few weeks,” he said. “When we’ve all reëmerged from the black hole of college basketball.”
