Overview

This book presents the mathematical tools that politicians use to make rational decisions about health, education, culture, economy, finance, transportation, and national defense for their citizens.  The selection of topics addressed is based on the experiences of four veteran politicians who have doctorates or master’s degrees in mathematics. The exposition also considers the mathematical tools used by politicians to capture votes or optimize their impact on the design of electoral districts, i.e., gerrymandering, without forgetting the mathematics applied to parliamentary activity  and political science. Aimed at a general educated readership, a basic knowledge of mathematics is the only requisite to understanding most of the book. Certain sections, denoted in the book with a star, contain more advanced material and require some knowledge of undergraduate math. A later chapter is dedicated to applications and techniques of machine learning and the final chapter discusses a variety of cases where political decisions have affected mathematical development. Readers gravitating towards this book are those who are curious about the history of mathematics, including optimizers and mathematicians who would like to learn more about the historical roots of their discipline. There will also be strong appeal to mathematically-oriented economists, political scientists, and people generally interested in mathematics. Mathematics is – or it should be! – an important part of our culture. The impact of mathematics is sometimes silent, but a powerful one. The authors of this book did an incredible work in digging out areas of mathematical reasoning that pervades social and political life. Reading this book, we will all enrich our vision of mathematics’ value for society. (Nuno Crato, Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Lisbon,  former minister of Education and Science of Portugal 2011–2015) This monograph shows in an impressive way that mathematics can be very helpful in making and evaluating political decisions and that it is indispensable in the progressive penetration of all areas of society with scientific methods. This also includes politics. Not everything in politics can be justified or related to mathematics, but politics should not be made in contradiction to mathematical truths. For me, this is a central message of this publication. (Johanna Wanka, Professor of Applied Mathematics, Merseburg University of Applied Sciences, former Minister of Education and Research, Germany 2013–2018)

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9783031527753

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Francisco J. Aragón-Artacho is an associate professor of statistics and operations research at the University of Alicante, Spain. After obtaining a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Murcia in 2007, he worked as an analyst for a private business company in Madrid for nearly a year. Subsequently, he held several postdoctoral positions at the University of Alicante, University of Newcastle (Australia) and the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine. His main research topics are in the area of convex and set-valued analysis, with special emphasis in the development of optimization and feasibility algorithms. He has published 39 research papers and the textbook Nonlinear Optimization (Springer, 2019), coauthored by M.A Goberna, M.A. López, and M.M.L. Rodríguez. Possibly his best-known work is Walking on real numbers (Math. Intelligencer 35, 2013), coauthored with D.H. Bailey, J.M Borwein and P.B. Borwein, which features a massive image generated on the first100 billion base-4 digits of π. He has served as Associate Editor for the journals Optimization Letters (since 2022) and Fixed Point Theory (since 2021). Miguel A. Goberna is an emeritus professor of statistics and operations research at the University of Alicante, Spain. He received a PhD in Mathematics in 1979 from the University of Valencia. His main research areas appear in the title, Geometry, Optimization, and Convex Analysis, of the Special Issue of the Springer journal Set-Valued and Variational Analysis in occasion of his 70th anniversary (Volume 30, No. 4, December 2022). He has published more than 150 research papers, but he is better known by his monographs Linear Semi-Infinite Optimization (J. Wiley, 1998), Post-Optimal Analysis in Linear Semi-Infinite Optimization (Springer, 2014) and Even Convexity and Optimization (Springer, 2020), and by his textbooks Algebra and Fundamentals (Ariel, 2000, in Spanish), LinearOptimization (McGraw-Hill, 2004, in Spanish) and Nonlinear Optimization (Springer, 2019). He has also published numerous articles on mathematics and/or politics, history of mathematics, education, etc. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the operations research Springer journal TOP between 2013 and 2016.

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