Month: March 2018

Karen Saxe, Director of Government Relations for the American Mathematical Society and DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College

 

Abstract:  Societal inequalities pose some of the biggest and most intractable challenges facing our nation today. Can mathematical concepts help us understand and analyze social inequality? What is the relationship between various imbalances in the U.S. today such as those we see in income distribution and political polarization? Many say that gerrymandering contributes to political polarization; can we use a quantitative strategy to determine the validity of this assertion? This talk will focus on quantitative approaches that mathematicians and political scientists use to measure social inequalities and fairness in redistricting. I will also discuss my advocacy work for the American Mathematical Society, and we’ll have plenty of time for Q & A. No mathematical background required.

Graciela Chichilnisky, lead architect of the carbon market of the Kyoto Protocol and a professor of economics and mathematical statistics at Columbia University, will give the keynote presentation for the 2018 Sustainability Symposium on Thursday, March 22, at 7 p.m. in Leanne Freas Trout Auditorium. Bucknell President John Bravman will introduce Chichilnisky, who also contributed to reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Getting Started in Analytics

Meghan Kent Harward, Analytical Consultant, Advanced Analytics Lab, SAS Institute Inc.

Thursday, March 8, 12:00 p.m. Room 268 in the Olin Science Building.

Abstract: We hear buzz words like “big data” and “the internet of things” more and more in our media, but do we really know what analytics is? In this talk we will explore paths to jobs in data science, what it means to be an analyst, and some keys to success in the field.