Instructor: Atticus W. McWhorter
Course on canvas.dartmouth.edu ⇗
Tentative Schedule
Note: Future topics listed here are tentative and will likely move around as time permits.
- Week 1: Introduction to Voting Systems
- Monday 3/30: Course introduction, social choice motivation
- Wednesday 4/1: Introduction to the axiomatic method: Monotonicity and Pareto Optimality
- Friday 4/3: Formalization: Preferences
- Week 2: The Axiomatic Method
- Monday 4/6: Formalization continued: Maximal sets and Choice Functions
- Wednesday 4/8: Arrovian Welfare Axioms
- Friday 4/10: Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
- Week 3: Arrow Continued
- Monday 4/13: An alternative proof
- Wednesday 4/15: The majority rule
- Friday 4/17: Single Peaked Preferences
- Week 4: Strategic Voting
- Monday 4/20: Other domain restrictions and introduction to strategic voting
- Wednesday 4/22: The Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem
- Friday 4/24: Strategy Proofness on Restricted Domains
- Week 5: Strategic Voting
- Monday 4/27: Condorcet winners and the median voter theorem
- Wednesday 4/29: Midterm Review
- Friday 5/1: MIDTERM EXAM
- Week 6: Introduction to Redistricting
- Monday 5/4: What makes a "good" district map
- Wednesday 5/6: Legal and mathematical constraints, compactness measures
- Friday 5/8: Efficiency gap and partisan symmetry
- Week 7: Measuring Gerrymandering
- Monday 5/11: The seats-votes curve
- Wednesday 5/13: Motivating ensemble methods
- Friday 5/15: Markov chains basics
- Week 8: MCMC
- Irreducibility and mixing
- Random walks on redistricting plans
- Generating ensembles of redistricting plans, outlier analysis
- Week 9: MCMC for Redistricting
- Monday 5/25: MEMORIAL DAY - NO CLASS
- Wednesday 5/27: Algorithm comparison and design
- Friday 5/29: Recent case studies
- Week 10: Advanced topics and Applications
- Monday 6/1: In-class project work
- Wednesday 6/3: In-class presentations
- Friday 6/5: FINAL PROJECT DUE