Campus News
Appelbaum in Germany
(Continued from Bulletin home page)
“I’m also going to be featured as mathematician of the week on the Year of Mathematics Web site! adds Appelbaum, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Mathematics Education and Curriculum Studies Programs at Arcadia and on sabbatical for 2007-08 an der Freien Universität Berlin. “They want to publicize my views on how everyone is a mathematician all of the time in their everyday lives. They think it will be interesting to feature an American professor who is spending the year in Berlin.”
“We got the Oberbürgermeister to agree to a meeting with school pupils to discuss whether or not (how) mathematical arguments against the rebuilding of the Schloß and a new bridge were simply ignored, as well as applied to manipulate the vote results regarding the form of the new Landestag (state representative meeting house),” says Appelbaum. “We’re making it a special school project for a week of mathematics and democracy.
“The Geschäftsführer Erich Jesse was inspired by our action to mention (at the official ceremeny, not in the interview) Gallileo’s comments on surface areas, which was very comical … but I chatted with him afterward about how he should be commended for mentioning this during the Year of Mathematics, and that he should register as a Math-maker on the Web site.
Appelbaum’s critique of the Schloß vote rested on two mathematical issues:
- The vote for the rebuilding of the palace was rigged. There were five options, and in the end only something like 36 percent of the votes went for rebuilding the palace, which was a minority of the votes. All of the other votes together were a majority against rebuilding the palace, but the way the vote was framed, they claimed the palace choice won. So the design of the vote was a mathematical manipulation to get the “right outcome,” when in fact fewer people wanted this. People sometimes make a similar claim about racial categories in self-descriptions on surveys. When there are many options, it makes it look like white people are the majority, when in fact more people across categories of Black, Asian, Hispanic, Latino/non-Hispanic, Pacific Islander, etc. make up the majority of a population. It’s a common political technique for manipulating data.
- For aesthetic reasons, people say the palace needs to be built on ground a few meters lower than the current ground, and then the current bridge would need to be closed, along with the street to which it leads. But then they still need a tram-bridge, so they want to build a new bridge. In order to do this, one needs to do a study that proves that a new bridge is economically feasible. What they did was look at a traffic data study that showed that about 8,700 cars per day travel in each direction in this street, and they argued that closing the street to the current bridge would save 52 cents per some kind of unit per car… so they could apply these savings to the costs of the new bridge. But of course, when you look at the map, you see that each car will not be disappearing. Instead, each car will in the future have to drive about three times as far around the city center/palace area to get to where they are going, which means costing more per car rather than saving money by not driving there. This was the “thesis” that the Oberbürgermeister said was mine, in comparison with the other study that said that the money could be saved and applied to the new bridge. In the part they showed of me talking in the video, I was saying it is not my thesis but an argument that needs to be considered and either countered with more data or accepted and that he shouldn’t just say, ‘that’s your argument.’ The number of cars traveling further than now is not my personal argument, I was saying, but a mathematical result that any elementary school child could understand. I was asking how he could label it an opinion rather than use the information to make an informed decision.