Daniel Biss

Daniel Kálmán Biss (born August 27, 1977) is an American mathematician and politician serving as mayor of Evanston, Illinois.

He previously served as a member of both the Illinois House of Representatives and Illinois Senate.

Biss attended Bloomington North High School in Bloomington, Indiana, and he was a finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in 1995.

He received an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude in 1998, and an MA and Ph.D. at MIT in 2002, all in mathematics.

He won the 1999 Morgan Prize for outstanding research as an undergraduate, and was a Clay Research Fellow from 2002 to 2007.

His doctoral advisor was Michael J. Hopkins.

Prior to pursuing a political career, Biss was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago from 2002 to 2008.

Prior to full-time pursuit of a political career, Biss was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago from 2002 to 2008.

At least four of the mathematics papers that Biss published in academic journals were later discovered to contain major errors.

He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 2003.

Mathematician Nikolai Mnëv published a report in 2007 that there was a "serious flaw" in two of Biss's works published in Annals of Mathematics and Advances in Mathematics in 2003, saying "unfortunately this simple mistake destroys the main theorems of both papers".

A member of the Democratic Party, Biss began his political career by running unsuccessfully as his party's nominee for the 17th district seat in the Illinois House of Representatives in 2008.

In 2008 and 2009, Biss acknowledged the flaw and published erratum reports for the two papers, thanking Mnëv for drawing his attention to the error.

Biss ran for a seat in the Illinois State House of Representatives in 2008, losing to Republican Elizabeth Coulson in the 17th district.

According to his responses in a 2008 "Political Courage Test", Daniel Biss supports carbon emissions limits and is pro-choice (supporting legal access to abortion services).

He also supports allowing Illinois high school graduates to pay in-state tuition at public universities regardless of immigration status, as well as state funding to raise the salaries of teachers.

He and a co-author, Benson Farb, also acknowledged in 2009 that there was a "fatal error" in a paper they had published in Inventiones Mathematicae in 2006, thanking mathematicians Masatoshi Sato and Tom Church for helping to explain the problem.

Starting in 2009, he then worked as a policy adviser to Pat Quinn, the Democratic governor of Illinois.

Biss was successful in 2010 at his second attempt at running for the Illinois House of Representatives, representing its 17th district from 2011 to 2013.

He successfully ran for the same Illinois State House seat in 2010.

He received a 7% rating by the NRA Political Victory Fund in 2010.

Biss has expressed support of labor unions and he received a $20,000 campaign contribution from AFSCME.

Biss also supports legalizing marijuana in Illinois.

On November 10, 2011, Biss announced his intent to run for the Illinois Senate seat held by retiring Senator Jeffrey Schoenberg.

In 2012, Biss was elected to the Illinois Senate, and represented its 9th district from 2013 through 2019.

He won the election on November 6, 2012, receiving over 66% of the vote, and was sworn in on January 8, 2013.

The district included a number of Chicago's northern suburbs, including Evanston, Glencoe, Glenview, Morton Grove, Northbrook, Northfield, Skokie, Wilmette, and Winnetka.

In 2013, Biss cosponsored SB 1, a bill that aimed to limit the annual growth of retirement annuities within state employee's pension plans in an attempt to reduce debts in the state retirement system.

In May 2015, the Illinois Supreme Court found the law unconstitutional.

In rejecting the constitutionality of SB 1, the Illinois Supreme Court stated: "These modifications to pension benefits unquestionably diminish the value of the retirement annuities the members…were promised when they joined the pension system. Accordingly, based on the plain language of the Act, these annuity-reducing provisions contravene the pension protection clause's absolute prohibition against diminishment of pension benefits and exceed the General Assembly's authority," the ruling states.

Another of his papers published in Topology and its Applications was formally retracted by the publisher in 2017, fifteen years after its 2002 publication, with the journal saying "This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief after receiving a complaint about anomalies in this paper. The editors solicited further independent reviews which indicated that the definitions in the paper are ambiguous and most results are false. The author was contacted and does not dispute these findings."

The journal said they had identified twelve specific errors in the paper, but clarified that they had concluded that the paper's findings were merely inaccurate, not fraudulent.

When contacted by the journal, Biss had responded saying "Thank you for writing. I am no longer in mathematics and so don't feel equipped to fully evaluate these claims. I certainly do not dispute them. If you would like to publish a retraction to that effect, that would seem to me to be an appropriate approach."

When the 2017 retraction and the previously identified errors were reported by the Chicago Sun-Times in September 2017, his campaign blamed operatives for the perceived front-runner for the Democratic Party candidate for governor of Illinois, J. B. Pritzker, for raising it as a political issue.

They said "Whether it was training at MIT or the University of Chicago, Daniel has had dozens of academic papers reviewed by his peers and published. In a few cases, further research has found that the case posited in the original article didn't stand up, and he revised his findings."

They referred to the raising of the issue as "silly opposition research".

Biss unsuccessfully ran as a candidate in the Democratic primary for Governor of Illinois in the 2018 election.

In 2021, he won the election for mayor of Evanston in the city's consolidated primary.

Biss was born into a Jewish Israeli family of musicians.

His brother is the noted pianist Jonathan Biss, his parents are the violinists Paul Biss and Miriam Fried, and his grandmother was the Russian-born cellist Raya Garbousova.