Date

March 7, 2020

The SIAM student chapters of Colorado are hosting their 16th annual regional student conference on applied mathematics for all schools along the Front Range. This event will allow students from different universities in the area to see what is being done in this field and promote interest in applied mathematics in general. This event is open to both undergraduates and graduate students.

You can view this year's poster here, this year's brochure here, and this years program here.

Location

University of Colorado at Denver
Check the page here for directions.

Call for Presentations

All students (undergraduate and graduate) are invited to submit abstracts on any research topic in applied mathematics. Please submit your title and abstract as soon as possible, but no later than February 22, 2020. All titles and abstracts should be submitted to FRAMSC.abstracts@gmail.com.

2020SIAM Conference Keynote Speaker

Speaker

Professor

Title

"Gerrymandering: What is it, how can we measure it, and what can we do about it?"

Abstract

Gerrymandering refers to the practice of drawing legislative districts so that one political party wins a disproportionate number of seats relative to their share of the electorate. But how can we tell whether or not districts have been drawn fairly? This is a legal question and, increasingly, a mathematical one, but the mathematical tools used to measure gerrymandering are relatively new and are still evolving rapidly.
One promising approach involves using computational and statistical tools to compare a specific districting plan to an “ensemble” consisting of a large number of potential districting plans. This approach, referred to as “outlier analysis," has the advantage of taking into account the inherent political geography of a region in a way that simpler measures cannot, and it has already begun to play a role in major court cases regarding redistricting in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.
In this talk I will describe how gerrymandering works and some of the mathematical tools that are being developed to detect it, with a focus on outlier analysis. I will also talk about an ongoing effort to collect data and perform this type of analysis for as many states as possible in advance of the next round of Congressional redistricting in 2021.

the Speaker

Jeanne Clelland is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Boulder. She received her Ph.D. in 1996 from Duke University and works in differential geometry and the application ofgeometry to the study of partial differential equations. Professor Clelland is the author of the textbook, fromFrenet to Cartan: The Method of Moving Frames. She isthe 2018 winner of the Burton W. JonesDistinguished Teaching Award, from the Rocky Mountain Section of theMathematical Association of America. Professor Clelland is also interested in applying geometry and mathematical techniquesto questions of gerrymandering.

Previous SIAM Conferences