The Math/Stats Colloquium is pleased to present the grand finale of our series of new faculty colloquia: Yan Zhang on “Voting Theory ‘Theorems’ and Misapplied Math”. Voting theory is an interdisciplinary (math, economics, social science) field studying how to combine the preferences of many voters into a single preference (such as elected representatives or policy). This talk discusses some classical results and show how they can be applied and misapplied, focusing on the celebrated Arrow’s Theorem and the slightly less-well-known May’s Theorem, both “theorems” about how innocuous constraints on a voting system can force it to have certain restrictive, and often very strange, properties. Our focus is not on the proofs but on the intuition the theorems give. We also discuss work in progress (joint with Mahendra Prasad, UC Berkeley) about a generalization of May’s Theorem and implications for the social sciences.
Background: No particular background required; no prior familiarity with voting theory assumed.
- Date: Fri Oct 28
- Time: 2:30-3:20pm
- Room: MH320
- Snacks: 2:00pm in MH331B
For more information, click here to see the full flyer, suitable for printing and posting.
Hope to see you there!
Upcoming events:
- Next colloquium, Fri Nov 18: Tullia Dymarz (U. Wisconsin)
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