Dean McMorris Is Featured Speaker at Second Annual Frank Harary Memorial Lecture

Buck McMorris, Dean of the College of Science and Letters and Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, was the featured speaker at the second annual Frank Harary Memorial Lecture at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, on Wednesday, March 12 in NMSU's Computer Science Department.

Harary, who died in 2005, is considered the "father of modern graph theory" and was a friend, an early mentor and an inspiration to McMorris, as well as a scholarly collaborator. Harary's book Graph Theory(1969) is one of the most-cited scientific publications in any field.

McMorris' lecture, "Majority-Rule Consensus: From Preferences (Social Choice) to Trees (Biology and Classification Theory)," examined different solutions to the problem of aggregating preferences of a group of voters into a group consensus preference. He gave historic background from the classical preference case (e.g., voting) and then pointed out some new and old mathematical and computational complexity results pertaining to the use of the majority-rule paradigm for finding consensus phylogenetic trees (biology) and classification structures (data analysis).

Harary published many papers that had an impact in the social sciences and was interested in "social choice theory" — in which voting theory is a sub-area.

(Taken from CSL News Page)