MIT World Speakers

Alan Natapoff

Alan Natapoff studied physics at Cornell, and as a graduate student in particle physics at Berkeley. He came to MIT as a postdoctoral fellow in biology and brain sciences and, since 1969, has been a research scientist at MIT's Center for Space Research in the Man-Vehicle Laboratory.

For several decades, Natapoff has been interested in the problems of voting power and was technical advisor to Harvard Medical School's faculty in the design of its voting system. In 1977 he was invited to testify on the design of the Electoral College before the Senate Judiciary's subcommittee on Constitutional Rights. In 1996, his views on the Electoral College appeared in Public Choice under the title, "A mathematical one-man one-vote rationale for Madisonian presidential voting based on maximum individual voting power."