Fall 2008
First Year Seminar
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Research
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Teaching Interests
Writing in Calculus
Previous Semesters

External Links
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Research Interests

My current research is in Voting Theory and involves exploiting some of the geometric interpretations developed by Don Saari at UC-Irvine. The basic problem arises when there are more than two candidates in an election. Depending on which procedure you use to determine the winner, you can get dramatically different outcomes, even if no one changes their preferences.

In addition to the obvious applications to political science, there are also applications turning up in some very surprising areas, including computational biology and computer science. The main appeal for me is that there is some really interesting mathematics involved which has the added bonus of being comparatively accessible to undergraduates.

By training, I am an algebraic topologist. My dissertation dealt with elliptic cohomology theories, and I did some work on the stable splittings of classifying spaces of finite groups.