Terry Tao’s open thread for mathematicians on the immigration executive order, not exactly a follow-up to it ought to be common knowledge that Donald Trump is not fit for the presidency of the United States of America. Tao writes:
mathematical research is a transnational activity, in that the specific nationality of individual members of a research team or research community are (or should be) of no appreciable significance for the purpose of advancing mathematics.
Not surprisingly, then, given the current political situation, 90 percent of people identifying themselves as “mathematician” donating money to US political campaigns give to Democrats, according to analysis by Verdant Labs. Only 85 percent of those calling themselves “Professor of Mathematics” do. One possible explanation is the those identifying as “professor of mathematics” identify more with their position as educators, and education doesn’t have the same “transnational” quality.
You can download the data from the FEC if you want! I suspect there’s something interesting in here… let’s see how my new laptop handles those twenty million records.
And please point me to interesting analysis of FEC data on campaign contributions that’s already been done! A couple things I’ve seen from the data science community:
- Someone named Gary did some analysis in November of 2015, for the 2016 presidential cycle as it had unfolded thus far in Ohio
- Verdant Labs has also looked at the politics of first names .
But there is surprisingly little out there, given that this is such an interesting data set!
If you want to do something more useful than navel-gazing at data, I recently came across Data for Democracy, and Moon Duchin is organizing a summer school on the geometry of redistricting, including some training in being an expert witness in gerrymandering cases. Will someone write the gerrymandr R package?
God plays dice 