At the home of:
Carey Lifschultz '93 and David Stiepleman '93
Pacific Heights
San Francisco, CA 94115
* The full street address will be provided upon registration
Drinks and hors d'oeuvres will be served.
R.S.V.P.
Please reply by April 25, 2017.
"A Mathematical Perspective on Elections"
We will briefly survey recent and past elections, examining the outcomes from the perspective of Arrow's Theorem, which indicates that all ways of collating voter preferences (e.g., plurality, Borda count, instant runoff, approval voting) have potentially serious drawbacks. If no system of determining the overall will of the voters is perfect, what voting system should we use?
Tanya Leise has been teaching in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Amherst College since 2004. Her coursework focuses primarily in applied mathematics, including multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, mathematical modeling, and wavelet analysis. Tanya's research on biological oscillators focuses on circadian rhythms in mammals and is highly interdisciplinary in nature. She works with colleagues in neuroscience and biology (at Smith College, UC San Diego, and other universities) to design and analyze experiments that reveal details of the physiological mechanism of the circadian clock at the cellular and tissue levels, and gain insight into these internal rhythms. She co-authored, and was the only mathematician on, a 2016 study published in Frontiers in Zoology, which examined whether the circadian clocks of grizzly bears "keep ticking" during their winter dormancy period. Tanya has offered courses often appealing to non-math majors, including a Fall 2016 course titled "Voting and Elections: A Mathematical Perspective" which examined different voting systems. She is also director of a Clare Booth Luce grant to support research by undergraduate women at Amherst College in the physical sciences, computer science, and mathematics. Tanya received a Bachelor of Science degree with honors from Stanford University and a Master of Science and Doctoral degree from Texas A&M University.
Questions? Please contact Liza Katz at lkatz@amherst.edu.