Douglas Woodall

Douglas Robert Woodall (born November 1943 in Stoke-on-Trent) is a British mathematician and election scientist. He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham in 1969, his thesis being "Some results in combinatorial mathematics". He worked in the Department of Mathematics from 1969 until his retirement in 2007, as researcher, lecturer, associate professor and reader. He devised the later-no-harm criterion, a voting system criterion in the comparison of electoral systems, and demonstrated it is compatible with the monotonicity criterion by developing his method of descending solid coalitions as an improvement on instant-runoff voting. He also contributed to the problem of fair cake-cutting, for example, by presenting an algorithm for finding a super-proportional division.