academic-life

From the Path: A Floor Under the Chaos

by

TOKYO — Earlier this week I wrote that there was a man I meant to come back to before I left Japan. This is me keeping the promise. The meeting that Maggie and I came to Tokyo for is the gathering of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, and at the turn of the … Read more

From the Path: A Monument the Size of an Integer

by

TOKYO — No guidebook leads with this, but Tokyo spent much of the twentieth century as one of the world’s quiet capitals of a strange and beautiful science: the mathematics of collective choice, the study of what a group of people actually do when they try to decide something together. The founding puzzle is older … Read more