Sponsored by MSUN's Office of the Provost and organized by the Instruction, Research, & Faculty Development committee, along with the Office of Teaching & Learning Excellence
RSVP
Seating is freely available but RSVPs are appreciated, and a sack lunch will be reserved for those who RSVP. Please complete the RSVP form here. Contact Emilee Luke with questions or cancellations.
Brown Bag Lectures allow faculty across all disciplines at MSU-Northern to showcase their work and to build a sense of community inquiry and interest around that work. Campus and community members are welcome to attend! View our Archive Brownbag Lecture Series page here.
Presentations will last about 1 hour and are located in either Hagener Science Center 101 ("The Pit") or Hensler Auditorium (in the Applied Tech Center/ATC). Printable campus map
Upcoming lectures
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Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025 — 11am-12pm in ATC Hensler Auditorium Presenter: Dr. Casey Donoven Lecture: Ranked Choice Voting: Benefits and Pitfalls Summary: M105 Contemporary Mathematics is MSUN's general education math class, specifically designed for students who don't need algebra, calculus, or statistics for their major. I teach less common topics that student may not have seen before, focusing on logic skills that are applicable to all future careers. I cover social choice theory, i.e. voting, for the first few weeks of class. There are many systems of voting that are appropriate for many different situations. One system is ranked choice voting, where voters express their opinion by ranking candidates in order of their preference. In this talk, I will present four different methods of ranked choice voting and what makes them different. I will also talk about the work of Kenneth Arrow, renowned economist and mathematician, who won a Nobel prize in 1972 for his work on the fairness of ranked choice voting. Bio: Dr. Casey Donoven, originally from Kremlin, MT, is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Montana State University Northern. After receiving a B.S. in Mathematics and a minor in Physics from MSU Bozeman, he went to the University of St Andrews in Scotland for a PhD in Mathematics. He then spent a year as a Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Bristol in England and three years as a Riley Assistant Professor at Binghamton University in upstate New York. Casey's research interests are primarily in algebra, specifically geometric group
theory and semigroup theory. His work in group theory includes studying Thompson's
Group V, finite state automata, and generation of infinite simple groups. In semigroup
theory, his focus has been on subsemigroup structure, including computation of maximal
subsemigroups and coverings by subsemigroups.
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Information for presenters
Please see our presenter guidelines. If you have questions or would like to present, please contact Emilee Luke.