The speaker for the 2016 Howard Rowlee Lecture is Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The lecture is at 4 p.m. March 17 in Avery Hall, Room 115. All faculty, staff and students are welcome to attend.
Ellenberg’s talk, “’There is No Such Thing as Public Opinion:’ The Mathematics of Elections, Public Policy and Slime Molds,” will address the truth behind Americans’ opinions on political issues.
Public opinion polls generally show that large numbers of Americans support cutting spending and oppose raising taxes, but when presented with cuts to government programs one-by-one, the cuts face majority opposition. This falls in line with the typical account of Americans being irrational thinkers who want a free lunch, with low taxes and big government programs for all. The truth is more complicated. Using mathematics, Ellenberg will explain such political phenomenon and address political events such as the Bush-Gore-Nader clash in Florida in 2000 and this year’s Republican primary.
Ellenberg, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been writing about math topics for a general audience for 15 years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Wired, The Believer and the Boston Globe. He is also the author of the column “Do the Math” in Slate, and his book “How Not to Be Wrong” was a 2014 New York Times bestseller.
Ellenberg’s research centers on the fields of number theory and algebraic geometry, and his work has uncovered new and unexpected connections between these subjects and algebraic typology. He was a plenary speaker at the 2013 Joint Math Meetings and he has lectured about his research in 11 countries. In 2013, Ellenberg was a member of the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. He has held a National Science Foundation CAREER grant and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015.
