2012 PPRUMC Keynote Address
Speaker: Dr. Loren Cobb, University of Colorado at Denver
Title: Nation-Building with Mathematics
Abstract:
We all know what academic and engineering mathematics looks like, but
what if you were asked to bring your math to Bolivia, or Somalia, or
Haiti, to help rebuild that nation's injured social institutions into
something stable enough to survive in the modern world? As recently as
25 years ago such opportunities simply did not exist. I had such a
chance in 1994, and spent the next 15 years in and out of South
America, working with a dozen different countries. Social pathologies
are difficult but fascinating problems, whether they are economic
(poverty, underground economies), criminal (drug trafficking, juvenile
gangs), political (corruption, ethnic relations, control of the
military and police), or demographic (refugees, migration, population
growth). In every case there is wonderful mathematics to be discovered,
and nontrivial questions of stability and change to ponder. This is a
field in its infancy, where new ideas are welcomed like water for a man
dying of thirst.