47 Lecture – Ismar Volić (Wellesley College)

Mathematics has played a largely unseen role in democracy for centuries, influencing everything from how votes are counted to how political boundaries are drawn. Today, classical mathematical ideas are finding unexpected new applications, while unprecedented computational resources are opening new avenues for analyzing and improving democratic systems. This talk will explore the historical connections between mathematics and democracy and survey contemporary research at this intersection, including voting theory, districting, apportionment, proportional representation, and digital democracy. Along the way, it will consider how mathematical rigor can be brought into productive dialogue with the complex human realities of politics, an increasingly important challenge at a time of profound strain on democratic institutions.

Ismar Volić is a Professor of Mathematics and the Director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College. He graduated from Boston University and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Brown University. His research is in topology and social choice theory. He is the author of many articles and books and has delivered more than three hundred lectures in over twenty countries. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University, MIT, and the University of Virginia, and is a 2026 Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Hill, TIME, and LitHub. His latest book, Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation, won the Mathematical Association of America’s Euler Prize and was a finalist for the PROSE award given by the Association of American Publishers. The book is based on The Mathematics of Democracy, a popular course he created and has taught for several years at Wellesley. His TEDx talk which highlights the main ideas from the book, The hidden math that shapes democracy, was selected as a TED Editors’ Pick.

Argue Auditorium is on the first floor of Pomona College’s Estella Laboratory at 610 N College Ave.  The talk is free and open to the Claremont community. A reception will follow the talk at 5:30pm.