This Year's Mathematics Awareness Month Highlights Mathematics and Voting

January 21, 2008

The Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (JPBM) has selected "Mathematics and Voting" as the theme of this year's Mathematics Awareness Month.

It’s an appropriate topic for a U.S. presidential election year, as candidates vie for attention in debates and primaries, polls take the ever-changing pulse of the electorate, and blogs proclaim disparate viewpoints. In the midst of this clamor, many citizens may very well ask, "Does my vote matter?"

Mathematics and statistics offer various means of dealing with the complexities of casting, counting, and analyzing votes. Statistics, for instance, provides ways to identify, measure, and address the sources of voting errors. Mathematics can be used to understand the effects of different voting systems on an election's outcome.

Indeed, voting can occur in any situation in which groups of people must express preferences or make choices—where to have dinner, how to raise money for a charity, who makes the team, which competitors belong in the top 10, and so on. Different voting systems can yield different outcomes.

Resources, including articles, essays, and a poster, for this year's Mathematics Awareness Month are available at www.mathaware.org.

Mathematics Awareness Month, held in April each year, was created to help increase public understanding of, and appreciation for, mathematics. Activities for Mathematics Awareness Month are organized at local, state, and regional levels by college and university departments, institutional public information offices, student groups, and related associations and interest groups.

JPBM is comprised of the American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Source: American Mathematical Society, Jan. 3, 2008.