Elections can be educational !

Jordan Ellenberg, novelist and math prof at Princeton, does the impossible: he provides a lucid explanation of both Bayesian analysis and Nash equilibria in the context of electoral strategy.

He also reads an awful lot...

Update: We could have a course on electoral math: Tall, Dark and Mysterious points out yet another set of articles on election math, this time focussing on the Banzhaf power index (a method for determining the relative power of blocs in a block voting system). For extra credit, consider the following:

The runtime of the programs doing these computations is already pretty high (O(2ⁿ)), but I wonder if there are any probabilistic variations on this index as applied to the electoral college.

Is there a more efficient approach ?