World Model · podcast knowledge graph

151 | Jordan Ellenberg on the Mathematics of Political Boundaries

2021-06-14 · 84 min · episode 151 · 11 entities

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    are the MAA Euler Book Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of How Not to Be Wrong and the novel The Grasshopper King . His new book is Shape: The Hidden Geome
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    Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of How Not to Be Wrong and the novel The Grasshopper King . His new book is Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Str
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Entities found in this episode

books 4

  • mentioned How Not to Be Wrong book
    0.81 · ×2
    evidence rules-v5
    are the MAA Euler Book Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of How Not to Be Wrong and the novel The Grasshopper King . His new book is Shape: The Hidden Geome
  • mentioned The Grasshopper book
    0.71 · ×2
    evidence rules-v5
    Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of How Not to Be Wrong and the novel The Grasshopper King . His new book is Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Str
  • references How Not to Be Wrong book
    0.69 · ×2
    evidence rules-v5
    are the MAA Euler Book Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of How Not to Be Wrong and the novel The Grasshopper King . His new book is Shape: The Hidden Geome
  • references The Grasshopper book
    0.60 · ×2
    evidence rules-v5
    Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of How Not to Be Wrong and the novel The Grasshopper King . His new book is Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Str

concepts 3

persons 2

  • mentioned Sean Carroll person
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    Feed author/publisher: Sean Carroll
  • hosted by Sean Carroll person
    0.55 · ×4
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed author/publisher: Sean Carroll

websites 2

  • mentioned Physics website
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    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: Physics
  • discusses Physics website
    0.40 · ×4
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: Physics
Episode description as stored
Any system in which politicians represent geographical districts with boundaries chosen by the politicians themselves is vulnerable to gerrymandering: carving up districts to increase the amount of seats that a given party is expected to win. But even fairly-drawn boundaries can end up quite complex, so how do we know that a given map is unfairly skewed? Math comes to the rescue. We can ask whether the likely outcome of a given map is very unusual within the set of all possible reasonable maps. That's a hard math problem, however — the set of all possible maps is pretty big — so we have to be clever to solve it. I talk with geometer Jordan Ellenberg about how ideas like random walks and Markov chains help us judge the fairness of political boundaries. Support Mindscape on  Patreon . Jordan Ellenberg received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1998. He is currently the John D. MacArthur professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin. He competed in the International Mathematical Olympiad three times, winning a gold medal twice. Among his awards are the MAA Euler Book Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of  How Not to Be Wrong  and the novel  The Grasshopper King . His new book is  Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else . Web site Wisconsin web page Google Scholar publications Amazon author page Wikipedia Twitter