Samuel Merrill III

Last updated

Samuel Merrill III (born 1939) is an American mathematician and political scientist best known for his work on alternative voting systems, voter behavior, party competition, and arbitration. [1] [2] [3]

Merrill was raised in Bogalusa, Louisiana. He received his bachelor's degree from Tulane University and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1965 from Yale University under C. E. Rickart with thesis Banach Spaces of Analytic Functions. [4] Merrill was a professor of mathematics and statistics at Wilkes University until he retired in 2004.

Samuel Merrill is the author of three books on political science:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Democracy</span> Form of government

Democracy is a system of government in which state power is vested in the people or the general population of a state. According to the United Nations, democracy "provides an environment that respects human rights and fundamental freedoms, and in which the freely expressed will of people is exercised."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Election</span> Process by which a population chooses the holder of a public office

An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office.

Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents. It has applications in many fields of social science, used extensively in economics as well as in logic, systems science and computer science. Traditional game theory addressed two-person zero-sum games, in which a participant's gains or losses are exactly balanced by the losses and gains of the other participant. In the 21st century, game theory applies to a wider range of behavioral relations, and it is now an umbrella term for the science of logical decision making in humans, animals, as well as computers.

Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies politics and government is referred to as political science.

Science is a rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world. Modern science is typically divided into three major branches: natural sciences, which study the physical world; the social sciences, which study individuals and societies; and the formal sciences, which study formal systems, governed by axioms and rules. There is disagreement whether the formal sciences are science disciplines, because they do not rely on empirical evidence. Applied sciences are disciplines that use scientific knowledge for practical purposes, such as in engineering and medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kenneth Arrow</span> American economist (1921–2017)

Kenneth Joseph Arrow was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972.

Public choice, or public choice theory, is "the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science". Its content includes the study of political behavior. In political science, it is the subset of positive political theory that studies self-interested agents and their interactions, which can be represented in a number of ways – using standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. It is the origin and intellectual foundation of contemporary work in political economy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Wilkes</span> English radical, journalist, and politician (1725–1797)

John Wilkes was an English radical journalist and politician, as well as a magistrate, essayist and soldier. He was first elected a Member of Parliament in 1757. In the Middlesex election dispute, he fought for the right of his voters—rather than the House of Commons—to determine their representatives. In 1768, angry protests of his supporters were suppressed in the Massacre of St George's Fields. In 1771, he was instrumental in obliging the government to concede the right of printers to publish verbatim accounts of parliamentary debates. In 1776, he introduced the first bill for parliamentary reform in the British Parliament.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven Brams</span> American mathematician (born 1940)

Steven J. Brams is an American game theorist and political scientist at the New York University Department of Politics. Brams is best known for using the techniques of game theory, public choice theory, and social choice theory to analyze voting systems and fair division. He is one of the independent discoverers of approval voting, as well as extensions of approval voting to multiple-winner elections to give proportional representation of different interests.

Duncan Black, FBA was a Scottish economist who laid the foundations of social choice theory. In particular he was responsible for unearthing the work of many early political scientists, including Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and was responsible for the Black electoral system, a Condorcet method whereby, in the absence of a Condorcet winner, the Borda winner is chosen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oscar Zariski</span> Russian-American mathematician

Oscar Zariski was a Russian-born American mathematician and one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century.

Arend d'Angremond Lijphart is a Dutch-American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, elections and voting systems, democratic institutions, and ethnicity and politics. He is Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is influential for his work on consociational democracy and his contribution to the new Institutionalism in political science.

An Economic Theory of Democracy is a treatise of economics written by Anthony Downs, published in 1957. The book set forth a model with precise conditions under which economic theory could be applied to non-market political decision-making. It also suggested areas of empirical research that could be tested to confirm the validity of his conclusions in the model. Much of this offshoot research eventually became integrated into public choice theory. Downs' theory abstains from making normative statements about public policy choices and instead focuses on what is rational, given the relevant incentives, for government to do.

Bernard Norman Grofman is a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine. He is an expert on redistricting and has been a special master on several district map redrawings.

The 1768 British general election returned members to serve in the House of Commons of the 13th Parliament of Great Britain to be held, after the merger of the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland in 1707.

Alan Dana Taylor is an American mathematician who, with Steven Brams, solved the problem of envy-free cake-cutting for an arbitrary number of people with the Brams–Taylor procedure.

A valence issue is an issue where there is a broad amount of consensus among voters. As valence issues are representative of a goal or quality, voters use valence issues to evaluate a political party’s effectiveness in producing this particular goal or quality.

Melvin Jay "Mel" Hinich was a professor of government and economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Hinich was also a research professor at UT's Applied Research Laboratories. Known as an expert in political science with a long record of distinction in a number of fields, he wrote seven books and published more than 200 papers in statistics/statistical theory, signal processing, economics, political science, biomedical engineering, pharmacy, and library science.

The Populars for Prodi was an electoral list of political parties in Italy.

Franklin Chandler Davidson was a professor of public policy and expert on voting rights at Rice University.

References

  1. Sawyer, Kathy (October 9, 1995). "A Paradox Of Majority Politics". p. A3. Retrieved 28 April 2011.
  2. Haskell, John (May 1996). Fundamentally flawed: understanding and reforming presidential primaries . Rowman & Littlefield. pp.  92–. ISBN   978-0-8476-8241-6 . Retrieved 28 April 2011.
  3. Farber, Daniel A.; O'Connell, Anne Joseph (May 2010). Research handbook on public choice and public law. Edward Elgar Publishing. pp. 130–. ISBN   978-1-84720-674-9 . Retrieved 28 April 2011.
  4. Samuel Merrill, III at the Mathematics Genealogy Project