The Lion's Pride Volume 11 (Winter 2019) | Page 34

Math in Politics: Big Data to AI
Miles Brownell
For a recent math assignment, we were tasked to find a connection
between the mathematics we learned in class and the real world. I picked
the topic of politics to investigate. I choose this topic because one of my
hobbies is following news and foreign affairs. Politics seemed like a
topic tangentially related to news with more readily available data. I
know from prior experience that politics is heavily reliant on data. This
is true now more than ever. These caches of data’s value became
glaringly apparent in the election of 2008.
The United States election of 2008 was a turning point in American
politics. This was of course the year Barack Obama was elected
president, the first African-American elected to the highest office.
However, this was far from the biggest change in Washington, D.C.
Obama’s democratic campaign was the first to fully commit to using big
data. Previous campaigns used elements of it in 2004, but 2008 was the
first time this data was incorporated into the campaign’s core strategy.
This was due to technology advancing enough to begin turning the
gluttony of big data into real world actionable plans. Big data is a term
used to describe data sets so vast that old curations styles no longer
apply. Ahron Wasserman, co-founder of the big data startup NGP VAN,
described how campaigns handled data prior to 2008: "Data at the time
was pretty soft, there were direct mail operations, but most data—