Petrovic Article in Notices of the AMS

The August 2019 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society features ”What Is … a Markov Basis?” by Sonja Petrović, associate professor of applied mathematics at Illinois Institute of Technology. In her article, Petrović examines a New York Times story by Hiroko Tabuchi that outlines the Japanese business tradition of shared ownership, a scheme designed to secure the status quo of that nation’s corporations. In this tradition, corporations own shares in one another “to create relationships that can protect them from outside interference.” Petrović confirms these claims through the use of a Markov basis, explaining the statistical intuition and process behind the New York Times article’s question to a broad mathematical audience.