MathAcrossCampus

It happens so often: In some election it is debatable whether the "winner" is who the voters really wanted. But the "winner" can affect the future of an organization, whether a fraternity, sorority, academic department, city, county, state, or country, so consequences can be serious. As described in this expository lecture, the power of mathematics is making it possible to identify the persistent villains that can lead us astray – our choice of voting rules. Because some of the nastier rules are so commonly used, audience members may leave legitimately worried about the accuracy of a recent election outcome.

The elementary processes of life are carried out by proteins. Proteins are very large molecules with thousands of atoms and many hundreds of degrees of freedom and hence have a vast number (~3^100) of possible conformations. Despite this diversity, proteins fold to single unique states which allow them to carry out their functions. Each protein has a unique amino acid sequence, and the folded structure of a protein is the lowest energy conformation for its amino acid sequence. I will discuss progress in predicting the structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences and in designing new proteins to address 21st century challenges. Both prediction and design are global optimization problems--the prediction problem is to find the lowest energy conformation for a given amino acid sequence, and the design problem, to find the lowest energy sequence for a desired structure or function. I will also describe how the general public has contributed to solving these global optimization problems through the distributed computing project Rosetta@Home and the online game FoldIt.