Siobhan Roberts in the New York Times: “Math is power” is the tag line of a new documentary, “Counted Out,” currently making the rounds at festivals and community screenings. (It will have a limited theatrical release next year.) The film explores the intersection of mathematics, civil rights and democracy. And it delves into how an understanding of math, or lack thereof, affects society’s ability to deal with the most pressing challenges and crises — health care, climate, misinformation, elections.
“When we limit access to the power of math to a select few, we limit our progress as a society,” said Vicki Abeles, the film’s director and a former Wall Street lawyer.
Ms. Abeles was spurred to make the film in part in response to an anxiety about math that she had long observed in students, including her middle-school-age daughter. She was also struck by the math anxiety among friends and colleagues, and by the extent to which they tried to avoid math altogether. She wondered: Why are people so afraid of math? What are the consequences?
One of many mathematicians who share their perspectives in the film is Ismar Volic, a professor at Wellesley College and a founder, in 2019, of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy. He is also the author of “Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps and Representation.”
Dr. Volic grew up in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country that in the early 1990s went through “a horrific war,” he said. “I am familiar with what collapse of democracy can lead to.” He saw parallels between what happened in Bosnia and what was happening in the United States and around the world. “That has driven me in the last few years, understanding the mechanics of democracy, the infrastructure of democracy, which is very much mathematical,” he said.
The following conversation, conducted by videoconference and email, has been condensed and edited for clarity.
The film is dedicated to Bob Moses, a civil rights activist known for his voter-registration work in the 1960s and later for founding the Algebra Project, a math program for students performing in the lowest quartile. How did Mr. Moses inspire you?
Abeles: Bob saw math as access to power in the 21st century. He knew that graduating from high school ready to take math for college credit was key to gaining access to careers and economic opportunity. He observed that students from historically marginalized communities, particularly Black and low-income students, often lack access to quality math education, and he argued that this inequity mirrored the segregation and disenfranchisement of the civil rights era. Bob believed that if society did not address this gap, we were perpetuating a cycle of inequality in which certain groups were systematically denied the tools they needed to thrive.
In civic life, decisions are increasingly driven by data, by algorithms, by statistics. Without the ability to understand or even grapple with the numbers and their implications, people are easily disenfranchised and manipulated. Like Bob, I came to see math literacy as not just a necessary skill but a civil right. You need a certain amount of math to be able to fully participate as a citizen.
From Mr. Moses’ vantage point, math literacy is a social justice issue. From another perspective, mathematics underpins the mechanisms of democracy. How so?
Volic: That’s the other side of the same coin: the mathematics that’s under the hood, the engine of democracy. Many of our electoral and legislative systems are mathematical at the foundation. Collecting and tallying votes, allocating legislative seats, deciding sizes of legislatures, drawing district maps. There are various mathematical ways that these things can be done, and math can also tell us which methods are good or not so good.
Your book “Making Democracy Count” encapsulates your course “Math and Politics,” which is open to all students and has no math prerequisites. How do students respond to the material?
Volic: They are outraged to learn about how we run our democracy in archaic and deficient ways. They are upset that there is a path to win the presidency with only 23 percent of the popular vote, that gerrymandering is rampant, that the system silences and disenfranchises millions of people. All this is amplified with the current election since we can see the dysfunction unfold in real time.
More here.
