Helen Barton Lecture: The Math and Politics of Counting People

Professor Moon Duchin, University of Chicago

Title: The Math and Politics of Counting People

Abstract: The Census is our most fundamental tool for measuring who lives in the United States, and where. Ever since the founding of the country, the categories have reflected how Americans think about ourselves, and the data gets used for everything from funding allocations to political districting. So, it might be surprising that the most recent Decennial Census included intentional injections of random numbers to noise the data for privacy protection. This was hugely controversial! In this talk, Moon Duchin will explain some of the history and the impacts of how we enumerate the country.

Moon Duchin is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at the University of Chicago. Her background in pure math centers on geometry, topology, groups, and dynamics; her applied work uses these tools to build algorithms and models to study the mechanisms of democracy. She runs a multidisciplinary lab bringing math and computing into conversation with law, policy, and geography. Duchin has served as an expert In numerous voting rights court cases around the country, and she is the co-editor of the volume Political Geometry. She is also an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute, which is dedicated to the study of complex systems. Duchin is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.