Summer 2023 Undergraduate Summer Research at IMD
Undergraduate summer research at IMD is in full swing, with several Wellesley College students continuing their studies into topics at the intersection of mathematics and politics:
- Ilinca Drondoe is a member of the Wellesley College Class of 2026. She hopes to major in Peace & Justice Studies and International Relations, and she is passionate about how understanding politics from a mathematical perspective can lead to socially just policy change. Her research began in Fall 2022 when she took Prof. Volić’s Mathematics and Politics class. She is in the process of building upon her final paper, which assesses the political implications of proposed United Nations Security Council reforms, using power indices to determine how they would affect the power balance between permanent and non-permanent members. She is excited to add a quantitative perspective to the conversation around UN reform, which she believes is essential for shaping policies that will improve its ability to respond to global crises and promote peace.
- Hanqi Zhu is a member of Wellesley’s class of 2026. She plans to major in Mathematics and Computer Science. She is interested in how mathematics, especially some of its more abstract parts, could be utilized and implemented to analyze politics and demographics. She is currently doing research on simplicial complexes and liquid democracy.
- Zixu Wang is a Davis-UWC scholar and a member of the class of 2024 at Wellesley College. While majoring in mathematics and minoring in computer science, she has broad interests and research experience in multiple humanities and social science fields. Her project aims to investigate the relationship between hypergraphs – notions such as clustering coefficient, local and global stability, homology, and contiguity – and political structures, with the objective of enhancing their modeling.
