Talk by David Meyer (UCSD)

Date and Time: Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 12:00 PM in AP&M B412.

Title: Winning elections with point-set topology

Abstract: It is well known that to win a US Presidential election it is not sufficient win the popular vote. Rather, because of the electoral college, the geographical distribution of votes is crucial. Data from past elections shows that a useful statistic describing the distribution of votes is its "dimension". I will explain the topological definition for the "dimension" of a subset of Euclidean space, estimate it for the Kerry and Bush votes in the 2004 US Presidential election, and recall the consequences for the outcome of that election.