Can I use these text analyses to understand the content of the bill, without reading 400 pages? Visualizing anti-trans legislation using RStudio Bianca Thompson Westminster University While I was working with Kenan İnce on their open source active learning book, Quantitative Reasoning for Social Justice, we discussed their dream chapterRead More →
It turns out that the game with alternate moves can be converted into a game with just one move... Payoffs and strategies Bill Casselman University of British Columbia Payoffs and strategies In a recent Feature Column I discussed a basic search tool used by computers to explore options in playingRead More →
Willa is an economist and Cara is a mathematician, so together they have decided to turn the problem of which game to play into a separate meta-game. Because they both love numbers, Willa and Cara start by creating matrices... Elliptic curves come to date night Ursula Whitcher Mathematical Reviews (AMS)Read More →
Mathematics helps develop definitions to compare different means to make something better or more fair. But there are inherent limitations, expressed as mathematical impossibility theorems... Impossible? Joe Malkevitch York College (CUNY) Introduction When you got up from sleeping last night, what were the possibilities that you could achieve in theRead More →
I don't believe that responsible people should indulge in anything that can be even remotely considered ultimatums or threats. That is not the way to reach peaceful solutions.—President Eisenhower, July 8, 1959. Daniel Ellsberg and the science of extortion Bill Casselman University of British Columbia Daniel Ellsberg died just lastRead More →
Inevitably, I think back to my favorite result in mathematics: when Diaconis used the representation theory of the symmetric group to show us that psychologists just don’t get along… What I Think About When I Think About Voting Sarah Wolff Denison University It’s November. Here in Ohio, that means cozyRead More →
The nuts and bolts of what I do when thinking about math are very similar to the nuts and bolts of thinking about a policy problem… Math Meets Congress Or, A Mathematician Goes to Washington Courtney Gibbons Hamilton College Thanks to the American Association for the Advancement of Science andRead More →