The homework can be found on the assignments page. Most Fridays, and possibly at others times during the week, you will turn in the problems on the material covered in class the previous week. Problems sets are due by 5 pm. You should upload a pdf of your assignment to the Google folder I created for you. You will be graded on the content, but also in large part on clarity and presentation, and will be expected to follow the guidelines from this document.

You are allowed to turn one homework assignment except the last one late, and this assignment has to be turned in on the due date of the next assignment. Subsequent late homeworks will not be accepted.

It is very important that you keep up with the assigned work. Each homework assignment will contain some problems of the sort you have not seen before (i.e. of the sort not done in class or worked out in the textbook). The reason is that the best measure of a good grasp of new material is an ability to apply it in new situations, and problems that look unfamiliar at first glance are meant to test this.

An important note about homework collaboration and the Honor Code: You are welcome to work with your classmates when solving homework problems. In the event that you have taken notes while working with someone else, you must put these notes away and recreate the solutions on your own as you write them up for submission. Using notes from a collaboration while writing up your homework assignment will be considered a violation of the Honor Code. In addition, you may NOT consult a written solution to a problem you are working on (whether it be online or in a book). Breaches in the Honor Code in any aspect of the course will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the college legislation. If you have any questions about this policy, please talk to me.

Since a part of each class is devoted to discussion and group work, you will be expected to contribute to the conversation. The class will frequently be broken into groups for brief conversations with a representative reporting the summary back to the class. Everyone is expected to do the reporting several times during the semester.

We will have one in-class exam which will take place in the second half of the course. More details can be found here.

There are various options for your final projects:

• Create a teaching module for a middle/high school class. See some sample modules here.

• Create and code computational or data analysis supplements for some of the teaching modules.

• Write a 7-8 page paper on a topic of your choosing. The topic should broadly be about the interaction of mathematics and politics, and it may or may not be related to something we are studying in class. You should consult with me before you choose a topic. Some potential options are

  • • Math and politics in your state

      • • How does your state vote? Does anything different happen on the local level? Are there attempts to change the voting method in your state? How are ties broken in your state? Is your state gerrymandered? Who runs the districting? Is there any math and politics education in your state's K-12 curriculum?

    • Proportional representation

      • • What is proportional representation? How does it work in other countries? Would it be possible to enact it in the U.S.? See this article from the New York Times.

    • Mathematics of polling

      • • How is it done, is it biased, what math is behind it?

    • Use of mathematical models in society

      • • How do math models and algorithms work? How are they biased? Look up the book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil. Also see this New York Times article and this NPR article.

    • "Winner's bonus"

      • • What is the "winner's bonus"? Give some examples and explanation of why it happens. Check out this article.

    • Mathematics of influencing voters on social media

      • • Is there some cool graph theory behind this? How do algorithms behind things like what Cambridge Analitica did work?

    • First Crypto Wars of the 1990s

      • • Civil liberties vs. national security, clipper chip, PGP, backdoors, weakened encryption.

    • More on gerrymandering and mathematical ways of detecting and preventing it

      • • Probabilistic methods for detecting gerrymandering pioneered by MGGG and recent court cases using this.

    • More recent variants of power indices and calculations

      • • Some more sophisticated variants of the Banzhaf and Shapley-Shubic indices and some calculations of the power structure in current institutions like the European Parliament, the IMF, etc.

    • More on uses and misuses of statistics in politics

      • • Tools, examples, common pitfalls, etc.

    • Nash equilibrium

      • • History, proof, interesting examples in politics, how it fits in game theory.

    • Quantitative literacy and rational political thinking

      • • Is there a connection between the two? Are people who are less numerate (quantitatively literate) less likely to think about politics rationally? This this webpage and this related article.

    • Political quantitative literacy education in K-12 in the U.S.

      • • Are any states including some math and politics education in their civics or math curriculum? Are topics like voting or apportionment taught anywhere in the K-12 system? What is the history of quantitative aspects of education in politics, civics, or history classes in the U.S.?

To help you with research for your project, LTS staff has also put together this helpful list of resources.