2026 Lecture Series: Ranthony A. Clark

Lecture Title: On the Geometry of Fairness

Dr. Ranthony Clark is a National Science Foundation Mathematical and Physical Sciences Ascending Postdoctoral Researcher and Phillips Griffiths Assistant Research Professor at Duke University. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Clark was a Berlekamp Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute. In Fall 2026, Dr. Clark will begin an appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Ohio State University.

ABSTRACT: Quantitative justice is an emergent interdisciplinary research area that uses mathematical, computational, and statistical tools to study problems arising from societal inequity. Central to this perspective is the idea that notions of fairness can be modeled and understood through mathematical structure.
Using electoral redistricting as a motivating setting, this talk develops a metric geometry perspective on computational redistricting. In this context, districting plans arise as graph partitions subject to legal and political constraints, while ensemble methods based on Markov chain Monte Carlo generate structured collections of such objects. Our focus is on how tools from metric geometry and optimal transport provide a framework for comparing, matching, and visualizing structured objects, and for making precise how different notions of similarity can be used to quantify fairness.