Ethics in Mathematics: A collection of case studies

$\newcommand{\EiM}{\mathbb{E}\text{i}\mathbb{M}}$

Welcome to our collection of case studies relating to Ethics in Mathematics ($\EiM$). We hope these will be of use to anyone trying to design and delier their own $\EiM$ course. This website is dedicated to providing case studies of areas of the world in which mathematics has had ethical consequences, and where mathematicians have had to make ethical choices.

As a mathematician, you will almost certainly encounter areas of life where you are called to do mathematics with ethical impacts – perhaps scheduling workers, or optimising public works, or sending rockets into space. Whatever this may be, we hope to give you the opportunity to think about how you should act in these scenarios.

It is often difficult to see how mathematical work is directly impacting the world around us, and where exactly mathematicians can be producing output. This is challenging even for mathematicians; for the lay public, it is practically impossible. Over the last few years, we have build up a collection of case studies, where mathematicians have done work that raises some (sometimes very serious) ethical questions. We have collected these here, by topic, to help you explore and understand what mathematicians do, and how this might be the source of societal harm.

We've collected together these case studies by topic. By clicking on one of the images below, you can see the set of case studies we've compiled in that topic.