Donald Saari, director of the Center for Decision Analysis at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), will give a convocation address titled “Elections! But do we elect whom we really want?” at 10:50 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 15 at the Carleton College Skinner Memorial Chapel. The event is free and open to the public.

In his lecture, Saari will explain in simple, mathematical terms the underlying structure of various voting systems, including the one by which we elect our president. He will show the chaotic nature of these systems – their susceptibility to being manipulated by voters or, more importantly in recent years, to fail to reflect voters’ true preferences.

Saari earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Michigan Technical University in 1962, followed by a master’s degree in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1967, both in mathematics from Purdue University. From there, after a year as a research staff astronomer at Yale University, he joined the mathematics department at Northwestern University. In 1988 he became a professor of economics in addition to his mathematics professorship, and in 1995 he was appointed the Arthur and Gladys Pance Professor of Mathematics. He left Northwestern to direct the Center for Decision Analysis and teach at UCI as a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Economics.

Saari's research interests center on dynamical systems and their applications to mathematical physics (primarily the Newtonian N-body problem) as well as to mathematical issues in the social sciences coming from economics, voting theory and psychology. In his recent book, “Chaotic Elections!,” which looks at the 2000 election and voting systems in general, Saari shows that the problems aren’t with courts and counts, but with the way the public votes. According to Saari, seemingly anomalous results, such as the 1998 election of wrestler Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota, can be explained more accurately by mathematics than by social theory. In a three-way race, Ventura won with only 37 percent of the popular vote. However, if ballot choices had been weighed according to preference (first choice, second, etc.), the outcome would have reflected that more than 60 percent of the voters wanted a candidate other than Ventura.

In addition to his positions at UCI, Saari is the chief editor of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society and serves on the editorial boards of several journals on analysis, dynamics, economics and decision analysis. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, the past chair of the U.S. National Committee of Mathematics, chair of the U.S. delegation to the 2002 general assembly of the International Mathematical Union, and a member of the NRC Math Science Education Board and the Board of International Scientific Organizations. He has honorary doctorates from Purdue University, Université de Caen in France and Michigan Technological University.

For more information and disability accommodations, call Carleton’s College Relations Office at (507) 646-4308.