35 Facts About Daniel Biss

Daniel Kalman Biss was born on August 27,1977 and is an American mathematician and politician serving as mayor of Evanston, Illinois.

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

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

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

Daniel Biss was born into a Jewish Israeli family of musicians.

Daniel Biss's 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.

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

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

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

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

Mathematician Nikolai Mnev published a report in 2007 that there was a "serious flaw" in two of Daniel 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, Daniel Biss acknowledged the flaw and published erratum reports for the two papers, thanking Mnev for drawing his attention to the error.

Daniel Biss and a co-author, Benson Farb, 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.

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

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

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

Daniel Biss supported allowing Illinois high school graduates to pay in-state tuition rates at public universities regardless of immigration status, as well as state funding to raise the salaries of teachers.

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

In June 2017, Daniel Biss voted to reinforce the Affordable Care Act in Illinois by prohibiting insurance companies from discriminating against customers with pre-existing conditions.

In 2015, Daniel Biss announced a run for Illinois Comptroller for the 2016 special election but dropped out and endorsed opponent Susana Mendoza.

On March 20,2017, Daniel 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.

Daniel 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 alleged human rights violations against Palestinians.

Daniel Biss later announced his selection of Rockford-based state representative Litesa Wallace, a single mother and former social worker.

Daniel 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.

Daniel Biss received two-thirds of preferential votes from Illinois members of the progressive advocacy group MoveOn.

On March 20,2018, Biss lost the Democratic primary to J B Pritzker.

On September 18,2018, Daniel Biss announced in an email to supporters that he had 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.

In January 2020, Daniel 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.

On September 16,2020, Daniel Biss announced the launch of a campaign for mayor of Evanston, Illinois.

Daniel Biss had a vast financial advantage over his two opponents.

Daniel Biss won a landslide victory in the consolidated primary on February 23,2021, forgoing the need for a runoff by receiving an outright majority of the vote.

Daniel Biss won all but one of the city's 50 voting precincts.

Daniel Biss remarked that, while a shift in the city's form of government would not be a priority to him, he is not opposed to exploring the idea if it would remedy issues in the city.

In March 2021, after Evanston passed a measure establishing the first expenditure of the city's first-in-the-nation municipal fund offering reparations to black residents, mayor-elect Daniel Biss released a statement in support of the approved measure.