Wednesday, January 02, 2008
CU Professor teaching a class to solve DNC math problems
WE’VE MOVED! Democratic Convention Watch is now at http://www.DemocraticConventionWatch.com
The Denver Post has a story on University of Colorado Professor Harvey Greenberg who is teaching a class called Math Clinic: Preparing for the Democratic National Convention.
When professor Harvey Greenberg thinks about the Democratic National Convention, he sees problems — math ones.
Like 12,000 volunteers in thousands of positions for five days means a million job shifts. Or hauling 35,000 people from the airport to the convention center — and doing it in an environmentally friendly way — means thousands of routes timed to perfection.
These problems pose a great learning opportunity for Greenberg’s math class at the University of Colorado Denver, where a few dozen students will toil on the stickiest and hairiest logistics for the biggest party Denver has hosted in a generation.
You can read more about the class at CU Denver’s website
The Democratic National Convention will be held in Denver August 25-28. Its planning is being co-managed by the national DNC Committee and the DNC Host Committee. Our goal is to understand preparation and planning challenges that are amenable to mathematical modeling. One example is bus scheduling to move delegates and others between hotels and the Pepsi Center. Less obvious are challenges associated with the Host Committee initiative: Greening the DNC . This is an exciting frontier not done by any other Convention Committee. There are many more challenges for planning this historic event, creating opportunities for us to explore.
It will be interesting to see what the findings are from the class and whether the DNC decides to use any of it in their planning.
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Posted by Oreo at 11:01 PM 
Unfortunately, thinking that you’re helping anything in a serious way in terms of environmentalism by carefully coordinating how you bus people across a city for a convention they all flew thousands of miles to get to is a good example of why we’re getting nowhere fast towards environmental sustainability.