What's the best way to match kidney donors with patients? Is ranked-choice voting everything it's made out to be, or is there a better way to vote? How do we design an auction so that people don't underbid? These questions lie at the intersection of computer science and economics and represent some of the most fascinating applications of real-world algorithms. Join us as we take a look at game theory, auctions, matching, voting theory, and more!

In this class, we'll discuss educational disparities in the United States through multiple lenses. Particularly, we'll read and discuss Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes and explore the history of American public schooling for part of the course, and for the other part of the course, we'll examine a dataset that attempts to determine how family income affects educational opportunity. To examine this data, we'll be using a few different Python packages that help us analyze large datasets. We'll also get to create our own graphs to visualize the data! We're excited to have you :)!