Speaker Series
The Mathematics of Social Choice
MƒA teachers can register for this event on the Small-World Network.
Date+Time
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The MƒA Thursday Think Speaker Series brings accomplished speakers who dive into cutting-edge topics in STEM education to MƒA. These talks, held once a month throughout the school year, invite MƒA teachers and the general public to learn and engage with these thought leaders and professionals in mathematics, science, and education.
In this Thursday Think, Dr. Emily Riehl explores the paradoxes and possibilities of the mathematics of voting, which seeks to answer, among other questions, if more than two candidates run for office, how should the winner be chosen? She also assuages fears suggested by the famous theorem of Arrow that the only flawless voting method makes one voter a “dictator” and put the theory into practice by considering the effects various algorithms would have had on actual federal, state, and local elections around the country.
Dr. Emily Riehl is an associate professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. She was an undergraduate at Harvard University, completed Part III of the Maths Tripos at Cambridge, earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and was a Benjamin Pierce and NSF postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Her research, supported by the National Science Foundation, involves various areas of “abstract nonsense” -- specifically higher category theory, abstract homotopy theory, and homotopy type theory. In addition, she enjoys explaining mathematical ideas through expository writing, most recently in an article "Infinity Category Theory Offers a Bird’s-Eye View of Mathematics" originally published with the title "Infinite Math" in the October 2020 issue of Scientific American.