Moon Duchin (Tufts University)
Date
Wednesday December 7, 20224:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location
Stirling Hall A, Online via Zoom2022 Lorne Campbell Lecture Series
Wednesday, December 7th, 2022
Time: 4:00 p.m. Place: Stirling Hall A, or Online via Zoom (contact Abdol-Reza Mansouri for Zoom link)
Speaker: Moon Duchin (Tufts University)
Title: How Societies Choose
Abstract: How can we measure a healthy democracy? There are infinitely many election systems -- how voters fill out a ballot and then how we combine ballots to decide the outcome -- and they all have different properties and tendencies. I will give some philosophical and some mathematical perspectives on finding fairness in representative democracy.
Dr. Duchin is a mathematics professor at Tufts University and founder of the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering group, a nonpartisan research group coordinating and publicizing research on geometry, computing, and their application to the redistricting process in the US. Her mathematical research concerns geometric topology, geometric group theory, Teichmuller theory, and the geometry of politics. Dr. Duchin is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, gave a 2016 Mathematical Association of America distinguished lecture, was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018, and in 2018- 2019 was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.