Math Prefresher for Political Scientists

Text for Harvard Department of Government Math Prefresher
Published

July 2024

About this Booklet

The Harvard Gov Prefresher is held each year in August. All relevant information is on our website, including the day-to-day schedule. The 2024 Prefresher instructors are António Câmara and Noah Dasanaike, and the faculty sponsor is Gary King.

This booklet serves as the text for the Prefresher, available as a webpage updated automatically and as a printable PDF updated manually. It is the product of generations of Prefresher instructors. See below for a full list of instructors and contributors.

For information about the role of the prefresher (or “math camp”) as a introduction to graduate school, you may also be interested in “The Math Prefresher and The Collective Future of Political Science Graduate Training”, in PS: Political Science & Politics, by Gary King, Shiro Kuriwaki, and Yon Soo Park.

Authors and Contributors

  • Past Authors and Instructors: Curt Signorino 1996-1997; Ken Scheve 1997-1998; Eric Dickson 1998-2000; Orit Kedar 1999; James Fowler 2000-2001; Kosuke Imai 2001-2002; Jacob Kline 2002; Dan Epstein 2003; Ben Ansell 2003-2004; Ryan Moore 2004-2005; Mike Kellermann 2005-2006; Ellie Powell 2006-2007; Jen Katkin 2007-2008; Patrick Lam 2008-2009; Viridiana Rios 2009-2010; Jennifer Pan 2010-2011; Konstantin Kashin 2011-2012; Soledad Prillaman 2013; Stephen Pettigrew 2013-2014; Anton Strezhnev 2014-2015; Mayya Komisarchik 2015-2016; Connor Jerzak 2016-2017; Shiro Kuriwaki 2017-2018; Yon Soo Park 2018; Meg Schwenzfeier 2019; Shannon Parker 2019; Laura Royden 2020-2021; Hunter Rendleman 2020-2021; Christopher T. Kenny 2022; Jialu Li 2022; Sooahn Shin 2023; María Ballesteros 2023.
  • Repository Maintainer: Christopher T. Kenny (christopherkenny)
  • Past Repository Maintainers:
  • Contributors: Thanks to Juan Dodyk (juandodyk), Hunter Rendleman (hrendleman), and Tyler Simko (tylersimko) for contributing to the booklet for corrections and improvements as students.

Contributing

We transitioned the booklet into a bookdown github repository in 2018. As we update this version, we appreciate any bug reports or fixes appreciated.

All changes should be made in the .Rmd files in the project root. Changes pushed to the repository will be checked for compilation by Travis-CI. To contribute a change, please make a pull request and set the repository maintainer as the reviewer.