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Latest Posts

Using Milankovitch Cycles to create high-resolution astrochronologies

November 30, 2020

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AIM/MCRN Summer School: Week 6

August 2, 2020

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Professor Christopher K.R.T. Jones — Recipient of the 2020 MPE Prize


Professor Chris Jones is the Bill Guthridge Distinguished Professor in Mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Mathematics and Climate Research Network (MCRN). The 2020 MPE Prize recognizes Professor Jones for his many significant contributions to climate science and the mathematics of planet Earth.

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Mathematics and Conflict Resolution

Mathematics, Political Systems, Social Systems

One of the main ideas behind the MPE2013 project was to showcase how mathematics solves the problems of the planet in ways that are are analytical and useful. At the heart of this initiative is the belief that when one uses mathematical models, the results are unemotional and valid, at least given that the model is a good approximation to the problem at hand. The hope then is that those in power will pay attention to the mathematics. This of course assumes something about the reasonableness of those in power, but for topics like climate change, the neutrality of mathematics should be an advantage in arguing for policy change.

The November issue of the AMS Notices has an intriguing article about the use of mathematics to help solve the Middle East Conflict. The authors, Thomas L. Saaty and H. J. Zoffer, discuss how the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) can to used to help sort out the complex issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In their words, the advantages of the AHP in dealing with conflicts is “that the process creatively decomposes complex issues into smaller and more manageable segments. It also minimizes the impact of unrestrained emotions by imposing a mathematical construct, pairwise comparisons and prioritization with a numerical ordering of the issues and concessions.” The article reports in detail (and fills in some of the mathematics at its core) on a meeting of the two sides held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in August of 2011, where important progress was made in addressing the critical issues of the conflict. The Pittsburgh Principles were the outcome of that meeting and they are described at the end in the article. The article is available here.

Estelle Basor
AIM

This entry was posted in Mathematics, Political Systems, Social Systems by Kent Morrison. Bookmark the permalink.

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