Daniel Biss
Daniel Kálmán Biss is an American mathematician and politician serving as mayor of Evanston, Illinois. He is a former member of both the Illinois House of Representatives and Illinois Senate.
Prior to pursuing a political career, Biss was an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago from 2002 to 2008.
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. 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. In 2012, Biss was elected to the Illinois Senate, and represented its 9th district from 2013 through 2019. 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.
In 2025, he announced his candidacy for Illinois's 9th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives, seeking to succeed retiring Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky in the 2026 midterm election.
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 paternal 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 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. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 2003.
Academic 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. The campaign 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
Biss ran for a seat in the Illinois State House of Representatives in 2008, losing to Republican Elizabeth Coulson in the 17th district. Starting in 2009, he then worked as a policy adviser to Pat Quinn, the Democratic governor of Illinois. He successfully ran for the same Illinois State House seat in 2010.Committee assignments
- Appropriations – Elementary & Secondary Education
- Personnel & Pensions
- Consumer Protection
- Small Business Empowerment & Workforce Development
- International Trade & Commerce
- Bio-Technology
- Appropriations – Higher Education
Tenure
In 2014 The State Supreme court ruled it violated the pension protection clause.
Illinois Senate
On November 10, 2011, Biss announced his intent to run for the Illinois Senate seat held by Senator Jeffrey Schoenberg, who was retiring. 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.Committee assignments
In the 98th Illinois General Assembly Biss was a member of:- Conference Committee on SB1. A joint House and Senate committee that sought a way to bypass the states constitutional pension protections.
- Education
- Environment
- Higher Education
- Licensed Activities & Pensions
- Local Government
Tenure
In 2013, Biss cosponsored SB 1, a bill that significantly reduced pension plans for retired state employees in an attempt to reduce debts owed to the state retirement system due to the state's many "pension holidays". 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.
Biss supported legislation protecting abortion access and supported legislation creating protections for LGBTQ+ youth.
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 authored by State Sen. Andy Manar to allow for automatic voter registration when applying for an Illinois driver's license.
2016 Illinois comptroller candidacy
In 2015, Biss announced his candidacy to seek the Democratic nomination in the 2016 special election for Illinois comptroller. In November 2015, Biss ended his candidacy and endorsed opponent Susana Mendoza for the Democratic nomination. Mendoza went on to win the primary and general election.2018 Illinois gubernatorial campaign
On March 20, 2017, Biss announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for governor of Illinois for the 2018 election. Biss's announcement was delivered during a Facebook Live video in which he criticized both incumbent governor Bruce Rauner and Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan. Biss joined a growing field of Democratic contenders, including businessman Christopher 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 because Ramirez-Rosa had expressed some support for the BDS movement which seeks to impose comprehensive boycotts on Israel over human rights violations against Palestinians. Biss's ally, Representative Brad Schneider, had rescinded his endorsement of the ticket over his pick of Ramirez-Rosa as his running mate, though Biss denied that that affected his decision. Biss later announced his selection of Rockford-based state representative Litesa Wallace, a single mother and former social worker.
Biss was 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 received 26.70% of the total vote, behind Pritzker with 45.13% and ahead of Chris Kennedy with 24.37%. Biss carried two counties, McLean and Champaign.