PRIMES: Researching and Teaching Mathematics of Fairness and Equity

Over the past several decades, formal mathematical models have contributed increasingly to advances in political science, and over these years mathematicians and economists have joined forces with political scientists to study timely and important issues, including fair representation in legislatures and multimember districts - in which multiple candidates rather than only one are elected to represent a jurisdiction - to produce legislative bodies more reflective of voting populations. The Principal Investigator will make significant contributions to public and civic discourse and advance understanding of the nature of U.S. representative democracy, including responses to the gerrymandering of districts for partisan gain and loss in state and local jurisdictions. Beyond this scholarly inquiry, the project will increase engagement of Black men in coursework and collaborative mathematical research, specifically in the mathematics of fairness and equity, an area closely connected to the social justice aims of Morehouse College, a historically Black college. This project will advance research in the mathematics of voting and representation. The PI examines the potential of multimember electoral districts, in conjunction with supporting election methods, to yield fair representation. One facet of this work is to consider fairness to individuals in a population through spatial models, in which the ideals of voters are represented by points in m-dimensional space where each coordinate of an m-dimensional point in a "policy space" represents the position of the citizen on a particular issue or interest. Spatial models in politics are well studied, but less so for multimember districts with multiple candidates elected simultaneously. The PI will develop and extend theoretical and experimental work on spatial models of multimember district elections. Beyond this thrust, other research results will arise more broadly from research collaborations established with other mathematical scientists during the Algorithms, Fairness, and Equity scientific program at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute. The project is funded jointly by the Infrastructure program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences and the Historically Black Colleges and Universitites-Excellence in Research (HBCU-EiR) Program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.