Lectures on Tap - "The Surprising Math Behind Democracy"

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: "The Surprising Math Behind Democracy"

🎤 Speaker: Dr. Andrea Jones-Rooy

We already know democracy is hard—we’re living it. But behind the toxic social media posts, endless shouting matches, the weirdness of the electoral college, and the general exhaustion many of us feel is a deeper, fascinating mathematical problem: how we even count votes in the first place.

Join us for an eye-opening tour of a Nobel Prize–winning mathematical proof from the 1950s and how it helps explain the chaos we see and experience in modern democracy. We’ll explore what this means for how we make our voices heard, aggregate votes, and move toward a system that serves as many of us as possible. (If you’re interested in ranked-choice voting, you’ll especially want to be here.)

Andrea Jones-Rooy, Ph.D., is a political and data scientist who uses quantitative methods to tackle polarization, misinformation, and challenges to democracy. A former professor of data science and political science at NYU and NYU Shanghai, they now focus on public-facing work as host of the podcasts Behind the Data and Political Reality.

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.