Mathematics & Political Geography
From communities of interest in redistricting to polling locations, geography plays a large role in our geography. In this episode we have two stories about how mathematics is taken on geographic problems in our democracy.
Show Notes
In this episode, the fourth episode of our mathematics and democracy season, we dig into two stories about the intersection of political geography and mathematics. The first story comes from Ranthony Clark and is about her work with the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group around identifying communities of interest, with a focus on her in Ohio alongside Care Ohio, the Ohio organizing collaborative, the Ohio Citizens Redistricting Commission, and the Kerwin Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State. The second story is about polling sites in cities, and the places in those cities that may not be covered as well as they should be. We hear from Mason Porter and Jiajie (Jerry) Luo, two members of the team, about how they used topological data analysis to find these holes in coverage.
Find our transcript here: Google Doc or .txt file
Curious to learn more? Check out these additional links:
Persistent Homology for Resource Coverage: A Case Study of Access to Polling Sites
Authors: Abigail Hickok, Benjamin Jarman, Michael Johnson, Jiajie Luo, Mason A. Porter
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Music by Blue Dot Sessions
The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is funded by NSF grant DMS-1929348