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.