Voting Paradoxes and Combinatorics

The early work of Condorcet in the eighteenth century, and that of Arrow and others in the twentieth century, revealed the complex and interesting mathematical problems that arise in the theory of social choice. In this lecture, Noga Alon, Visiting Professor in the School of Mathematics, explains how the simple process of voting leads to strikingly counter-intuitive paradoxes, focusing on several recent intriguing examples.