Alma Steingart researches the interplay between politics and mathematical rationalities. Her second book manuscript, Accountable Democracy: Mathematical Reasoning and Representative Democracy in America, 1920 to Now, examines how mathematical thought and computing technologies have impacted electoral politics in the United States in the twentieth century. She focuses on the census, apportionment, congressional redistricting, ranked voting, and election forecasts, investigating how changing computational practices have influenced definitions of "fair representation" of the American electorate. In Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism (2023, University of Chicago Press), she excavates the influence of axiomatic reasoning on mid-century American intellectual thought, spanning natural and social sciences, literary criticism, and modern design. Professor Steingart was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and a predoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Roundtable Appearances
