The Mathematical Sorting Hat
Published in UMAP journal, 2012
A. Beveridge and S. Cooke, The Mathematical Sorting Hat, UMAP journal, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2012), pp. 99-118.
Preprint link: https://github.com/mathbeveridge/mathbeveridge.github.io/blob/master/files/sortinghat.pdf
We describe the development and implementation of an automated procedure for assigning first-year students to seminars at Macalester College. The heart of the procedure is to find a minium weight perfect matching on a bipartite graph using the Hungarian algorithm.
Note: we improved this procedure in later years using integer linear programming. See The Sorting Hat Goes to College.