About

Positionality statement

My research does not begin from methodological neutrality. I was born into poverty and am descended from generations of Scottish working-poor. The people sorted by poverty lines, counted by welfare systems, and archived in panel datasets are my people. I have chosen to examine the machinery of that counting partly because I was once among the counted, and partly because I think that position matters for the quality of the questions one asks.

The TDA work is a more uncertain undertaking. I am testing whether methods from algebraic topology can reveal something true about poverty trajectories that conventional methods miss. I am not certain they can. I think that uncertainty is worth stating publicly.

Research Interests

Background

I am a Mathematics undergraduate at The Open University, where I completed a research internship examining the lives of mathematicians from underrepresented backgrounds — work aimed at offering a more inclusive lens on mathematical history. In the course of that project I encountered Mollie Orshansky, the statistician who created the US poverty line in the early 1960s. I wrote about her life and method in an undergraduate essay that won the British Society for the History of Mathematics Undergraduate Essay Prize in 2025.

Orshansky's story opened a larger question: how had the state learned to count the poor, and what had it done with that knowledge? The essay became the seed of Counting Lives, a deeper examination of two centuries of poverty measurement — its methods, its politics, and the gap between them.

The TDA research programme grew from a different impulse: the desire to do mathematics on a problem that matters to me personally, using methods rigorous enough to say something true. Whether that ambition fully succeeds is not certain. I publish the work openly and in progress because I think that transparency — including the possibility of failure — is more honest than waiting for certainty.

I have chosen to pursue both projects as an independent researcher. That choice is not accidental. Counting Lives documents in some detail how official systems have historically processed and neutralised principled attempts to measure poverty honestly. I am conscious of the irony of making that argument from any institutional position.

  • British Society for the History of Mathematics Undergraduate Essay Prize, 2025 — essay on Mollie Orshansky
  • Research Internship, The Open University — Inclusive Mathematical History
  • BSc Mathematics, The Open University — in progress

Contact & Links

Media Kit

Short biography (~150 words)

Stephen Dorman is an independent researcher and Mathematics undergraduate at The Open University. His work spans two interconnected projects: Counting Lives, a historical examination of how poverty measurement has been used as a political instrument from Rowntree's York surveys to contemporary multidimensional indices; and a programme of ten linked papers applying topological data analysis to longitudinal poverty and employment trajectories from UK household panel data.

He came to this work through a research internship examining underrepresented mathematicians in history, from which grew an essay on Mollie Orshansky — creator of the US poverty line — that won the British Society for the History of Mathematics Undergraduate Essay Prize in 2025. He was born into poverty and comes from many generations of Scottish working-poor. He publishes all work openly and in progress at zktheory.org.

Long biography (~500 words)

Stephen Dorman is an independent researcher and Mathematics undergraduate at The Open University. His research comprises two closely linked projects: Counting Lives, a book-length historical investigation into the politics of poverty measurement, and a programme of ten linked papers applying topological data analysis to UK longitudinal panel data.

The book traces how poverty lines have functioned as political instruments across two centuries of measurement practice — from Quetelet's statistical imagination and Rowntree's dietary surveys through the post-war Beveridge settlement, the rediscovery of relative poverty in the 1960s, and the turn to multidimensional indices in the 1990s and 2000s. Its central argument is that the poverty line was never a neutral scientific instrument: it has always been a site of political contestation, dressed in the language of social science. The book pays particular attention to the moments at which principled measurement was absorbed and redirected by the institutional systems it was meant to scrutinise.

The TDA research programme applies methods from algebraic topology — particularly the Mapper algorithm and persistent homology — to employment and poverty trajectories drawn from the British Household Panel Survey and its successor, Understanding Society. These methods allow patterns in high-dimensional trajectory data to be examined without imposing a predetermined model structure. The programme is a personal mathematical pursuit. Stephen publishes it with explicit uncertainty about whether it will succeed, and believes that transparency about the limits of a method is more useful than silence.

Stephen came to this research through a process that reflects its content. A research internship at The Open University, focused on the lives of mathematicians from underrepresented backgrounds, led him to Mollie Orshansky — the statistician and social worker who created the original US poverty line in 1963. He wrote about Orshansky's life and method in an undergraduate essay that won the British Society for the History of Mathematics Undergraduate Essay Prize in 2025. Orshansky's story — a working-class woman who counted the poor with unusual honesty, whose work was immediately put to political uses she had not intended — became the seed of Counting Lives.

Stephen was born into poverty and comes from many generations of Scottish working-poor. He does not approach this subject from a position of analytical distance. The people counted in panel surveys, sorted into poverty quintiles, and argued over in parliamentary reports are not abstractions to him. He has chosen to pursue this research as an independent researcher partly because Counting Lives documents how institutional systems have historically neutralised attempts to measure poverty honestly, and partly because he thinks the independence changes what questions it is possible to ask.

All research, code, and data are published openly and in progress at zktheory.org.