Lectures on Tap - "The Mathematics of Gerrymandering"

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: "The Mathematics of Gerrymandering"

🎤 Speaker: Ismar Volić

Gerrymandering has become one of the central battlegrounds of American politics, with parties manipulating electoral maps and courts rolling back protections against unfair districts. In this talk, Professor Ismar Volić will reveal how mathematics can expose and help eliminate these abuses of political power.

Using geometric and statistical tests, along with cutting-edge computer simulations, he will show how experts detect and measure gerrymandering in real-world electoral maps. He will also discuss solutions, including proportional representation—the system used by most democracies around the world—which offers a mathematically simple and powerful way to ensure fairer elections.

Ismar Volić is a Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College. A leading researcher in topology and social choice theory, he has delivered hundreds of lectures in over twenty countries and has been a visiting professor at Harvard, MIT, and the University of Virginia. His latest book, Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation, won the Mathematical Association of America’s Euler Prize and was a finalist for the PROSE award.

Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🙌

Agenda

6:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.

6:55 PM – Host introduction

7:00 PM – Lecture begins

7:45 PM – Audience Q&A

8:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round

8:30 PM – Wrap up.