Math And... Seminar: The Politics of Numbers

The U.S. decennial census is both a political instrument and a counting mechanism. The interaction between the technical methods of counting and the political impact of those technical methods has created controversies over the centuries. The talk will discuss several historical examples, including controversies over apportionment in the 1920s; the undercount correction methods of the 1960s to the 1990s, and lay understanding of probability sampling.