Jonathan Christopher Mattingly of Duke University has been selected to deliver the 2021 I.E. Block Community Lecture. He will be presenting the lecture on Tuesday, July 20 from 1:30-2:30 p.m. ET at the SIAM Annual Meeting (AN21) which is taking place virtually July 19 -23, 2021. The lecture is open to the public and is named in honor of I. Ed Block, a co-founder and the first managing director of SIAM. If not registered for AN21, register free here to attend the talk.
Jonathan Christopher Mattingly
Dr. Mattingly has been a proud and engaged member of SIAM for years. “SIAM was central to my scientific formation as an applied (stochastic) dynamicist,” Mattingly says. “I gave some of my first talks at SIAM Conferences and have been a regular at the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical System for years as well as regularly attending many others. I feel strongly that the application of mathematics is important to our society and that the best applications breed great mathematics.”
Dr. Mattingly grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. He graduated from the NC School of Science and Mathematics and received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics with a concentration in physics from Yale University. After two years abroad with a year spent at ENS Lyon studying nonlinear and statistical physics on a Rotary Fellowship, he returned to the U.S. to attend Princeton University where he obtained a Ph.D. in Applied and Computational Mathematics in 1998 under the supervision of Yakov Sinai. After four years as a Szegö assistant professor at Stanford University and one year as a member of the IAS in Princeton, he moved to Duke in 2003, where he is currently James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics and a Professor of Statistical Science.
Since 2013 he has also been working to understand and quantify gerrymandering and its interaction of a region's geopolitical landscape. This has led him to testify in several court cases including Common Cause v. Rucho, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was also involved with a sequence of North Carolina state court cases which led to the NC congressional and both NC legislative maps being deemed unconstitutional and replaced for the 2020 elections. He was awarded the Defender of Freedom award by Common Cause for his work on Quantifying Gerrymandering.
This shows a multiscale spanning tree used as a proposal in the Metropolis-Hastings MCMC scheme use to generate maps for a policy driven measure on the space of redistricting. The map is of the southern edge of North Carolina on the border with South Carolina.
Dr. Mattingly's talk is titled Can You Hear the Will of the People in the Vote? Assessing Fairness in Redistricting via Monte Carlo Sampling. The U.S. political system chooses representatives to localized geographic districts and every 10 years, the Census counts the population, requiring new districts. Gerrymandering is the harnessing of this administrative process for partisan political gain. The release of the new Census numbers in 2021 has again moved redistricting into the national consciousness. Society is confronted with the need to create and evaluate districting maps. In this talk, Dr. Mattingly explores the following questions: Can we recognize gerrymandering when we see it? Is proportionality relevant? What is fair? How does the geopolitical geometry inform these answers? What is the effect of incumbency protection or the Voting Rights Act, or more generally, the preservation of communities of interest?
Since 2013, Dr. Mattingly's group has developed methods using Monte Carlo sampling to reveal the structure of the map between votes and political outcomes under typical districtings. This is a story of the interaction between lawyers, mathematicians, and policy advocates, each group pushing the other. The problem of understanding gerrymandering has also prompted the development of several new computational algorithms which come with new mathematical questions. There are challenges in how to formulate the policy questions mathematically, in how to perform the needed collations in a computationally feasible way, and then in how to best transmit the results to empower policy makes, the courts, and the polis at large by increasing their understanding of the issues in play. This is a joint work with G. Herschlag and others, including high school students and undergraduates.
“It is important for people to understand gerrymandering and its effect on our election system,” he says. “My hope is to give a framework so that everyone can formulate the central issues in gerrymandering and be empowered to enter into the conversation both in the classroom and our political forums.”
The above is a collection of histograms giving the marginal democratic vote share of the 13 NC Congressional districts ranging over roughly 24,000 sampled plans when the districts are ordered from most Republican to most Democratic. This was shown in Harper v. Lewis, which resulted in the existing NC Congressional Maps being replaced with new maps (represented by the orange dots), which were used in the 2020 elections.
Dr. Mattingly is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and a Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship. He is a fellow of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and the American Mathematics Society (AMS) and has served on the advisory boards for several NSF institutes.
The I. E. Block Community Lecture is given each year at the SIAM Annual Meeting and is free and open to the public. Due to COVID-19, SIAM AN21 and the 2021 Block Lecture are happening virtually. If you are not registered for AN21, remember to register for free to attend the talk on Tuesday, July 20 from 1:30-2:30 p.m. ET.
To suggest future presenters, click here. For more information about SIAM AN21, click here.
This post was last updated July 13, 2021.