Donald G. Saari
| Donald G. Saari | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 1940 (age 77) Houghton, Michigan |
| Nationality | American |
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| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | Singularities of the n-Body Problem of Celestial Mechanics (1967) |
| Doctoral advisor | Harry Pollard |
| Doctoral students | |
| Notable awards |
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Donald Gene Saari (born March 1940) is an American mathematician, the Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Economics and director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include the n-body problem, the Borda count voting system, and application of mathematics to the social sciences.
Saari is also known for having some discussion with Theodore J. Kaczynski in 1978, prior to the mail bombings that led to Kaczynski's 1996 arrest.
Saari has been widely quoted as an expert in voting methods and lottery odds. He is opposed to the use of the Condorcet criterion in evaluating voting systems, and among positional voting schemes he favors using the Borda count over plurality voting, because it reduces the frequency of paradoxical outcomes (which however cannot be avoided entirely because of Arrow's impossibility theorem). For instance, as he has pointed out, plurality voting can lead to situations where the election outcome would remain unchanged if all voters' preferences were reversed; this cannot happen with the Borda count. Saari has defined, as a measure of the inconsistency of a voting method, the number of different combinations of outcomes that would be possible for all subsets of a field of candidates. According to this measure, the Borda count is the least inconsistent possible positional voting scheme, while plurality voting is the most inconsistent. However, other voting theorists such as Steven Brams, while agreeing with Saari that plurality voting is a bad system, disagree with his advocacy of the Borda count, because it is too easily manipulated by tactical voting. Saari also applies similar methods to a different problem in political science, the apportionment of seats to electoral districts in proportion to their populations. He has written several books on the mathematics of voting.
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