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Moon Duchin

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Moon Duchin
NationalityAmerican
Alma materHarvard University (BA Mathematics and Women's Studies 1998)[1]
University of Chicago (MS Mathematics 1999, PhD Mathematics 2005)[1]
Known forResearch in geometric group theory and the mathematics of gerrymandering
AwardsFellow of the American Mathematical Society, Guggenheim Fellowship
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsCornell University, Tufts University
ThesisThin triangles and a multiplicative ergodic theorem for Teichmüller geometry (2005)
Doctoral advisorAlex Eskin

Moon Duchin is an American mathematician who works as a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, on academic leave from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts as of 2024.[1] Her mathematical research concerns geometric topology, geometric group theory, and Teichmüller theory.[2] She has done significant research on the mathematics of redistricting and gerrymandering, and founded a research group, MGGG Redistricting Lab, to advance these mathematical studies and their nonpartisan application in the real world of US politics.[3] She is also interested in the cultural studies, philosophy, and history of science.[2] Duchin is one of the core faculty members and serves as director of the Science, Technology, and Society program at Tufts.[1][2]

Early life and education

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Duchin was given her first name, Moon, by parents "on the science-y fringes of the hippie classification".[4] She grew up knowing from a young age that she wanted to become a mathematician.[4] As a student at Stamford High School in Connecticut, she completed the regular high school mathematics curriculum in her sophomore year, and continued to learn mathematics through independent study.[4] She was active in math and science camps and competitions, and did a summer research project in the geometry of numbers with Noam Elkies.[4]

Duchin studied at Harvard University as an undergraduate, where she was also active in queer organizing,[5] and finished a double major in mathematics and women's studies in 1998.[4][6] At the time, she was unsure how to combine the two majors into a single thesis, so she decided to write two separate ones.[7]

As a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Chicago, she continued feminist activism by teaching gender studies and pushing the university to add gender-neutral bathrooms,[4][8] and was mentioned mockingly by name on the Rush Limbaugh show.[4] She completed her doctorate in 2005, under the supervision of Alex Eskin.[9] She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Davis, and the University of Michigan, before joining the Tufts faculty in 2011.[4][6]

Work

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Duchin's mathematical research has focused on geometric topology, geometric group theory, and Teichmüller theory.[2] For example, one of her results is that, for a broad class of locally flat surfaces, the geometry of the surface is entirely determined by the shortest length in each homotopy class of simple closed curves.[10] In 2022 Duchin appeared in the Netflix documentary A Trip to Infinity,[11] discussing the mathematical implications of infinity.

Duchin's expertise in geometry has led her to conduct research on the mathematics of gerrymandering. A key aspect of this research is the geometric notion of the compactness of a given political district, a numerical measure that attempts to quantify how extensively gerrymandered it is.[12] “What courts have been looking for is one definition of compactness that they can understand, that we can compute, and that they can use as a kind of go-to standard”, she said in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education.[13]

To help tackle the challenge of finding an agreed-upon standard, Duchin has developed a long-term, wide-ranging project on the mathematics of gerrymandering.[13] As a part of this project, she founded a summer program to train mathematicians to become expert witnesses in related legal cases.[14][15] In 2016, she founded the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG) which is a nonpartisan research group that coordinates and publicizes research on geometry, computing, and their application to the redistricting process in the US.[16][7]

In 2018-2019 she took a leave of absence from Tufts, and was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her research focus was "Political Geometry: The Mathematics of Redistricting".[17] In 2018, Governor of Pennsylvania Tom Wolf enlisted Duchin to help him evaluate newly drawn redistricting maps for fairness.[18] This happened as a consequence of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania decision which declared the state's 2011 US congressional districting map to be unconstitutional.[19] Duchin prepared a report published on February 15, 2018.[20][21]

As of 2021, Duchin has returned to her position at Tufts, and continues her work with MGGG.

In 2022, a panel of judges threw out Alabama's soon-to-be-used congressional maps, citing the fact that the percentage of black people in the state had risen to about a quarter of the population. To draw some new, fairer maps, they turned to Duchin, who came up with 4 nearly-similar maps that would put the Black and Democratic-leaning cities of Mobile and Montgomery together, therefore complementing the one Black and blue-leaning district in the state with a second one.[22]

Awards and honors

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In 2016 Duchin was named as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to geometric group theory and Teichmüller theory, and for service to the mathematical community".[23] She was also a Mathematical Association of America Distinguished Lecturer for that year, speaking on the mathematics of voting systems.[24] In 2018 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.[25]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d "Moon Duchin". Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. Tufts University. September 8, 2017. Retrieved September 28, 2021.
  2. ^ a b c d "Department of Mathematics: People: Moon Duchin". math.tufts.edu. Tufts University. Archived from the original on February 24, 2019. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  3. ^ "Our Mission". Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group. Retrieved November 2, 2021.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h Vanderkam, Laura (June 23, 2008), "Blazing a trail for women in math: Moon Duchin", Scientific American.
  5. ^ Welker, Kristen (December 3, 1994), "Defamatory Poster Appalls Students", The Harvard Crimson
  6. ^ a b "Moon Duchin [CV]" (PDF). math.tufts.edu. Tufts University. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  7. ^ a b Strogatz, Steven (April 7, 2020). "Moon Duchin on Fair Voting and Random Walks". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved September 28, 2021.
  8. ^ Closeted/OUT in the Quadrangles: A History of LGBTQ Life at the University of Chicago, University of Chicago Libraries, 2015, archived from the original on April 26, 2015, retrieved December 15, 2016.
  9. ^ Moon Duchin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  10. ^ Technically, "shortest length" here means an infimum of lengths, as there is not generally a single shortest representative curve for the class. See Bowman, Joshua Paul (2011). Review of Duchin, Moon; Leininger, Christopher J.; Rafi, Kasra (2010), "Length spectra and degeneration of flat metrics", Inventiones Mathematicae, 182 (2): 231–277, arXiv:0907.2082, Bibcode:2010InMat.182..231D, doi:10.1007/s00222-010-0262-y, MR 2729268, S2CID 10528656.
  11. ^ Halperin, Jonathan; Takahashi, Drew (September 26, 2022), A Trip to Infinity (Documentary), Makemake, Room 608, retrieved October 22, 2022
  12. ^ "Can Geometry Root Out Gerrymandering?". Science Friday. Retrieved January 26, 2019.
  13. ^ a b "Meet the Math Professor Who's Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry". The Chronicle of Higher Education. February 22, 2017. Retrieved September 5, 2018.
  14. ^ "Regional Sites – Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group". sites.tufts.edu. Retrieved September 5, 2018.
  15. ^ "A Summer School for Mathematicians Fed Up with Gerrymandering". The New Yorker. Retrieved September 5, 2018.
  16. ^ Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group. "Our Team". Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group. Retrieved September 28, 2021.
  17. ^ "Moon Duchin". Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Harvard University. April 5, 2018. Retrieved November 10, 2018.
  18. ^ "Governor Wolf to Enlist Mathematician to Evaluate Redistricting Maps". Governor Tom Wolf. January 26, 2018. Retrieved May 14, 2020.
  19. ^ "Pennsylvania Supreme Court Holds Congressional Map Violates PA Constitution | The Public Interest Law Center". www.pubintlaw.org. Retrieved May 14, 2020.
  20. ^ Duchin, Moon. "Outlier analysis for Pennsylvania congressional redistricting" (PDF). Governor of Pennsylvania. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 24, 2020. Retrieved May 14, 2020.
  21. ^ Ingraham, Christopher (February 13, 2018). "Pennsylvania governor rejects Republicans' new congressional map". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 15, 2020.
  22. ^ Rakich, Ryan Best, Aaron Bycoffe and Nathaniel (August 9, 2021). "What Redistricting Looks Like In Every State - Alabama". FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved January 27, 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  23. ^ 2017 Class of the Fellows of the AMS, accessed December 11, 2016.
  24. ^ Math and the Vote: A Geometer Examines Elections, Mathematical Association of America, accessed December 11, 2016.
  25. ^ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Moon Duchin". Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved September 5, 2018.
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