Daniel Biss


Daniel Kálmán Biss is an American mathematician and politician who was the member of the Illinois Senate for the 9th district from January 2013 until January 2019. The district includes Chicago's northern suburbs, including Evanston, Glencoe, Glenview, Morton Grove, Northbrook, Northfield, Skokie, Wilmette, and Winnetka. Biss first ran for office in 2008 and was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives from 2011 to 2013. He was also a candidate in the Democratic primary for Governor of Illinois in the 2018 election.
Prior to pursuing a political career, Biss was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago from 2002 to 2008.

Early life and education

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.
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 a Ph.D. at MIT in 2002, both 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. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 2003.
Biss also wrote an appendix for the 2006 young adult novel An Abundance of Katherines, written by John Green.

Career

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. 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". 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. 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. 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".

Illinois House of Representatives

Committee assignments

Illinois Senate

Committee assignments

Tenure

Political positions

According to his responses in a 2008 "Political Courage Test", Daniel Biss supports carbon emissions limits and is pro-choice. 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 received a 7% rating by the NRA 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.
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. Biss later said that his work on SB 1 was an error, saying "I decided this was the least bad of the bad options. I allowed myself to think we couldn't do better." Biss later expressed support for funding higher pension payments if necessary by instituting a tax system with a graduated income tax and a tax on financial transactions.
In March 2017, Biss sponsored SB 1424, a bill proposing a system of matching state funds for small-donor political contributions and SB 780, a bill proposing to elect a number of statewide offices by ranked-choice ballot. He also co-sponsored SB 1933, a bill by State Sen. Andy Manar to allow for automatic voter registration when applying for an Illinois driver's license.
Biss supports universal health care and advocates specifically for a state-level single-payer healthcare system. In June 2017, Biss voted to reinforce the Affordable Care Act in Illinois by prohibiting insurance companies from discriminating against customers with pre-existing conditions.

Political campaigns

Biss ran for a seat in the Illinois State House of Representatives in 2008, losing to Republican Elizabeth Coulson. Starting in 2009, he then worked as a policy adviser to Pat Quinn, the Democratic governor of Illinois.
On November 10, 2011, Biss announced his intent to run for the Illinois Senate seat held by retiring Senator Jeffrey Schoenberg. He won the election on November 6, 2012, receiving over 66% of the vote, and was sworn in on January 8, 2013.
Biss announced a run for Illinois Comptroller in the 2016 special election but dropped out and endorsed opponent Susana Mendoza.
On March 20, 2017, Biss announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Illinois for the 2018 election on a Facebook Live video, attacking incumbent governor Bruce Rauner and Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan. Biss joined a growing field of Democratic contenders, including businessman C. G. Kennedy and Chicago alderman Ameya Pawar.
Biss briefly named Chicago alderman and Democratic Socialists of America member Carlos Ramirez-Rosa as his gubernatorial running mate, but dropped him from the ticket after just six days after Ramirez-Rosa expressed some support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions boycott movement against Israel. Biss later announced his selection of Rockford-based state representative Litesa Wallace, a single mother and former social worker.
Biss had been endorsed by many of his colleagues in the Illinois General Assembly, high-profile academics and activists including Nobel laureate Richard Thaler and presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig, National Nurses United, the largest organization of registered nurses in the United States, and Our Revolution, the successor organization to Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. Biss received two-thirds of preferential votes from Illinois members of the progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org.
On March 20, 2018, Biss lost the Democratic primary to J. B. Pritzker. He earned 26.70% of the total vote, behind Prizker with 45.13% and ahead of C. G. Kennedy with 24.37%.
Biss carried two counties, McLean and Champaign.

Post-senate activities

On September 18, 2018, Biss announced in an email to supporters that he has accepted the position of executive director of the nonprofit Rust Belt Rising, which aims to train and support Democratic candidates in the Great Lakes states. Biss was succeeded in the Illinois Senate by Laura Fine on January 6, 2019.
On August 15, 2019, Biss announced his endorsement of Elizabeth Warren for president. In January 2020, Biss was selected to be on Warren's slate of 101 potential Illinois delegates to the 2020 Democratic National Convention, but Warren suspended her campaign on March 5, before the presidential primary in Illinois on March 17.

Electoral history

YearDemocraticVotesPctRepublicanVotesPct
2012Daniel Biss68,06466.63%Glenn Farkas34,08133.37%
2014Daniel Biss55,986100.00%