Mathematics Awareness Month 2008
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008The American mathematical society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics announced that the theme for Mathematics Awareness Month 2008 is Math and Voting. Among others the AMS has on their news website also a link to a newsweek article by Sharon Begley and to the mathawareness campaign itself, which includes a very easy to understand demonstration on how different voting systems lead to different results. In particular the difference between a pure ranking system and a system, where one assignes weights/values to the choice like in method 2 (approval voting) or method 3 as a special case of Instant-runoff voting is displayed.