Noga Alon Examines Voting Paradoxes and Combinatorics in Talk at Institute for Advanced Study

October 13: Noga Alon on Voting Paradoxes & Combinatorics

Noga Alon, Visiting Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study and Baumritter Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, will present“Voting Paradoxes and Combinatorics” on Wednesday, October 13, at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute campus.

In this talk, Alon, a leading mathematician known for his contributions to theoretical computer science and combinatorics, will review the early work of Condorcet in the eighteenth century and that of Arrow and others in the twentieth century. He will explain how their work revealed the complex and interesting mathematical problems that arise in the theory of social choice. Focusing on several recent intriguing examples, Alon will show how the simple process of voting leads to strikingly counterintuitive paradoxes.

After earning a Ph.D. in mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1983, Alon held visiting positions at various research institutes including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, IBM Almaden Research Center, Bell Laboratories, Bellcore and Microsoft Research. Alon joined the faculty of Tel Aviv University in 1988. He has been a Member in the School of Mathematics at the Institute numerous times, beginning in 1993.

Alon is the author of more than four hundred research papers and the book, The Probabilistic Method, with Joel H. Spencer (Wiley-Interscience, 2008). He serves on the editorial boards of more than a dozen international technical journals. Alon is a member of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea. In addition to receiving the 2008 Israel Prize in mathematics and the 2005 Gödel Prize for outstanding papers in theoretical computer science, Alon was awarded the Anna and Lajos Erdös Prize in Mathematics in 1989, the Feher prize in 1991, the Polya Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2000, the Michael Bruno Memorial Award in 2001, and the Landau Prize in 2005.

For further information about the lecture, which is free and open to the public, please call (609) 734-8175, or visit the Public Events page on the Institute website, www.ias.edu.

About the Institute for Advanced Study

The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. The Institute exists to encourage and support curiosity-driven research in the sciences and humanities—the original, often speculative thinking that produces advances in knowledge that change the way we understand the world. Work at the Institute takes place in four Schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Social Science. It provides for the mentoring of scholars by a permanent Faculty of approximately 30, and it ensures the freedom to undertake research that will make significant contributions in any of the broad range of fields in the sciences and humanities studied at the Institute.

The Institute, founded in 1930, is a private, independent academic institution located in Princeton, New Jersey. Its more than 6,000 former Members hold positions of intellectual and scientific leadership throughout the academic world. Thirty-three Nobel Laureates and 40 out of 56 Fields Medalists, as well as many winners of the Wolf and MacArthur prizes, have been affiliated with the Institute.