Guest Lecture: William Zwicker

Three Topics in the Mathematical Social Sciences*

William Zwicker, Professor of Mathematics at Union College, New York - USA, is currently fellow-in-residence at CY AS, invited by laboratory THEMA

I’ll touch briefly on three strands of my current research:

• Fair Division: How can a collection of goods be shared fairly among a group of people who may not agree on the relative value of the various goods?
• Collective Decision making:  Several former teachers differ as to which among their students would benefit most by being placed in a more challenging mathematics course next year, and which would be better off with additional review of the basics.  How should their individual views be aggregated into a collective decision on how best to split the group?
• Citation Indices and Nash’s solution to the bargaining problem:  John Nash’s solution to the bargaining problem uses the key idea of scale invariance.  How can the same principle be applied to improve the citation index proposed by Jorge Hirsch? 

These topics are well placed to illustrate the value of mathematical thinking in the social sciences:  the importance of precise definitions with clear interpretations (exactly what does it mean to be fair?) the payoff from generalization and abstraction (what common principles apply to many similar aggregation problems?) and the proper role of axiomatic characterization (why should we favor one particular citation index over another?).

* With co-authors VITTORIO BILÒ, IOANNIS CARAGIANNIS, MICHELE FLAMMINI, JOSEP FREIXAS, ROGER HOERL, AYUMI IGARASHI, GIANPIERO MONACO, DOMINIK PETERS, and COSIMO VINCI.

Date : 26 October 2021 from 12:30 to 14:00

The hybrid guest lecture is organised in person at the Auditorium of MIR in Neuville-sur-Oise and remotely on Zoom..

The video is online on the CY AS YouTube channel