151 | Jordan Ellenberg on the Mathematics of Political Boundaries

151 | Jordan Ellenberg on the Mathematics of Political Boundaries

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.


Jaksot(416)

AMA | March 2026

AMA | March 2026

Welcome to the March 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patre...

2 Maalis 3h 53min

345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large Universe

345 | Adam Elga on Being Rational in a Very Large Universe

Behaving rationally involves facing up to conditions of uncertainty; we never navigate the world with perfect confidence. Sometimes we are uncertain about the way the world is, but we can also be unce...

23 Helmi 1h 34min

344 | Adam Gurri on Liberal Democracy and How to Fight For It

344 | Adam Gurri on Liberal Democracy and How to Fight For It

It's possible to look at the course of history over the past few centuries and discern a movement toward increasing democracy, freedom, and individual rights -- "liberalism," in the political-philosop...

16 Helmi 1h 21min

343 | Tom Griffiths on The Laws of Thought

343 | Tom Griffiths on The Laws of Thought

For all that human beings spend a lot of their time thinking, it's far from obvious what that process actually entails. Part of it amounts to classical logical reasoning. But an even bigger part invol...

9 Helmi 1h 19min

AMA | Feb 2026

AMA | Feb 2026

Welcome to the February 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

2 Helmi 3h 10min

342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind

342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind

Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There ...

26 Tammi 1h 37min

341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle

341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote W.B. Yeats. I don't know about the centre, but the tendency of things to fall apart is pretty universal, ultimately due to the Second Law of Thermody...

19 Tammi 1h 12min

340 | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters

340 | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters

At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to matter, and more importantly, what does it mean for us to mat...

12 Tammi 1h 18min

Suosittua kategoriassa Tiede

rss-poliisin-mieli
rss-mita-tulisi-tietaa
tiedekulma-podcast
docemilia
rss-luontopodi-samuel-glassar-tutkii-luonnon-ihmeita
rss-duodecim-lehti
radio-antro
utelias-mieli
filocast-filosofian-perusteet
rss-lapsuuden-rakentajat-podcast
rss-lihavuudesta-podcast
rss-sosiopodi