Football Pools—A Game for Mathematicians

Abstract

have some nice, relevant properties. At the same time another group of people combinatorialists are busy trying to produce many different types of arrays of numbers with special features. We have the feeling that the two groups are not well acquwainted with each other's work, although recently some mathematical journals have published papers reporting results obtained by the playing community, and we hope that this paper will contribute to increasing the mathematicians' interest in these problems. The problems are natural and mathematically easy to formulate, but are highly nontrivial and can be attacked using powerful combinatorial machinery.