Mathematics and Electoral Systems Date: Tuesday, October 19th Time: 2:00 until 6:00 Location: 120 Smith Hall

The Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Delaware is pleased to announce this special event focusing on the mathematics underlying elections and voting.  The 2000 Presidential election raised the public awareness of uncertainties, errors and variations in design of voting systems.  Problems arising in elections and voting systems offer rich material for a vast array of disciplines.  A common feature in all approaches to these problems is a need for quantitative evaluation and analysis, and so the Department of Mathematical Sciences and the College of Arts and Sciences are pleased to sponsor this special event on the mathematical structure of elections and voting. This symposium will feature expert lectures both for specialists, the university community and the general public.

Click here for Program or Abstracts

Download a poster for the Math and Electoral Systems event

Invited Speakers:

Prof. Bill Briggs
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado Denver

William Briggs has been on the mathematics faculty at the University of Colorado at Denver for 20 years. He received his B.A in mathematics from the University of Colorado and his M.S. and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard. He teaches throughout the undergraduate and graduate curriculum with a special interest in mathematical modeling and differential equations as it applies to problems in the biosciences. Ten years ago he developed the quantitative reasoning course for liberal arts students at CU-Denver, supported by the textbook Using and Understanding Mathematics that he co-authored. He has taught that course regularly since its inception and has become a proponent of quantitative reasoning/literacy in the undergraduate curriculum. He has written two other tutorial monographs, The Multigrid Tutorial and The DFT: An Owner's Manual for the Discrete Fourier Transform. He is a University of Colorado President's Teaching Scholar, a recipient of the Outstanding Teacher Award of the Rocky Mountain Section of the MAA, and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ireland.

Prof. Jasjeet Sekhon
Department of Government
Harvard University

Dr. Sekhon is an Associate Professor of Government and an associate of the "Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences" at Harvard University. He is an expert on the mathematical analysis of social science data. He has written extensively on how voters behave and on the effects of voting technologies and ballot formats on election outcomes. For example, he coauthored an article entitled "The Butterfly Did It: The Aberrant Vote for Buchanan in Palm Beach County, Florida" which demonstrated that the butterfly ballot cost Albert Gore the presidential election in Florida in 2000. The article was published in the _American Political Science Review_ which is the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed journal in the field. Dr. Sekhon's publications also include articles on the degree to which poorly informed voters behave rationally and technical articles which develop new statistical and computational methods for making inferences from social science data.

Prof. Steven Brams
Department of Politics
NYU

Steven J. Brams is Professor of Politics at New York University. He is the author or co-author of 14 books that involve applications of game theory and social choice theory to voting and elections, bargaining and fairness, international relations, and the Bible and theology.  He has written two books focusing on presidential elections and voting systems The Presidential Election Game (Yale University Press, 1978) and Approval Voting (with Peter C. Fishburn)  (Birkhauser, 1983).  His most recent books are Theory of Moves (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and, with Alan D. Taylor, Fair Division: From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution (Cambridge University Press, 1996)  and The Win-Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everybody (W.W. Norton, 1999).  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Public Choice Society (President, 2004-2006), a Guggenheim Fellow, a past president of the Peace Science Society (International), and in 1998-99 was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.

For more information contact:

Dr. Phillip Broadbridge (pbroad@math.udel.edu)
Dept. Math Sciences
501 Ewing Hall
Newark DE, 19716

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Last Modified: October 6, 2004
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