Moon Duchin is an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

who works as a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

Tufts University Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...

Medford, Massachusetts Medford is a city northwest of downtown Boston on the Mystic River in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. At the time of the 2020 U.S. Census, Medford's population was 59,659. It is home to Tufts University, which has its campus alo ...

. Her mathematical research concerns

geometric topology In mathematics, geometric topology is the study of manifolds and maps between them, particularly embeddings of one manifold into another. History Geometric topology as an area distinct from algebraic topology may be said to have originated i ...

geometric group theory Geometric group theory is an area in mathematics devoted to the study of finitely generated groups via exploring the connections between algebraic properties of such group (mathematics), groups and topology, topological and geometry, geometric pro ...

, and Teichmüller theory. She is also interested in the cultural studies,

philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

, and

history of science The history of science covers the development of science from ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural, social, and formal. Science's earliest roots can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Meso ...

and

Philosophy of mathematics The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. It aims to understand the nature and methods of mathematics, and find out the place of mathematics in people's ...

. Duchin is one of the core faculty members and serves as director of the Science, Technology, and Society program at Tufts. She has done significant research on the mathematics of

redistricting Redistribution (re-districting in the United States and in the Philippines) is the process by which electoral districts are added, removed, or otherwise changed. Redistribution is a form of boundary delimitation that changes electoral dist ...

and

gerrymandering In representative democracies, gerrymandering (, originally ) is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage for a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency. The m ...

, and founded a research group, MGGG Redistricting Lab, to advance these mathematical studies and their nonpartisan application in the real world of

US politics The politics of the United States function within a framework of a constitutional federal republic and presidential system, with three distinct branches that share powers. These are: the U.S. Congress which forms the legislative branch, a b ...

. In 2022 Duchin appeared in the

Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fil ...

documentary A trip to infinity, discussing the mathematical implications of

infinity Infinity is that which is boundless, endless, or larger than any natural number. It is often denoted by the infinity symbol . Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the philosophical nature of infinity was the subject of many discussions amo ...

Early life and education

Duchin was given her first name, Moon, by parents "on the science-y fringes of the

hippie A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to different countries around ...

classification". She grew up knowing from a young age that she wanted to become a mathematician. As a student at Stamford High School in

Connecticut Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its cap ...

, she completed the regular high school mathematics curriculum in her sophomore year, and continued to learn mathematics through independent study. She was active in math and science camps and competitions, and did a summer research project in the

geometry of numbers Geometry of numbers is the part of number theory which uses geometry for the study of algebraic numbers. Typically, a ring of algebraic integers is viewed as a lattice in \mathbb R^n, and the study of these lattices provides fundamental information ...

with

Noam Elkies Noam David Elkies (born August 25, 1966) is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University. At the age of 26, he became the youngest professor to receive tenure at Harvard. He is also a pianist, chess national master and a chess composer. Ear ...

.. Duchin studied at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

as an undergraduate, where she was also active in queer organizing, and finished a

double major A double degree program, sometimes called a dual degree, combined degree, conjoint degree, joint degree or double graduation program, involves a student's working for two university degrees in parallel—either at the same institution or at diffe ...

in mathematics and women's studies in 1998. At the time, she was unsure how to combine the two majors into a single thesis, so she decided to write two separate ones. As a graduate student in mathematics at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

, she continued

feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...

activism by teaching

gender studies Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field ...

and pushing the university to add gender-neutral bathrooms, and was mentioned mockingly by name on the

Rush Limbaugh Rush Hudson Limbaugh III ( ; January 12, 1951 – February 17, 2021) was an American conservative political commentator who was the host of '' The Rush Limbaugh Show'', which first aired in 1984 and was nationally syndicated on AM and FM r ...

show. She completed her doctorate in 2005, under the supervision of Alex Eskin. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the

University of California at Davis The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The institut ...

, and the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

, before joining the Tufts faculty in 2011.

Work

Duchin's mathematical research has focused on

, and Teichmüller theory. 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 In topology, a branch of mathematics, two continuous functions from one topological space to another are called homotopic (from grc, ὁμός "same, similar" and "place") if one can be "continuously deformed" into the other, such a deforma ...

class of

simple closed curve In topology, the Jordan curve theorem asserts that every ''Jordan curve'' (a plane simple closed curve) divides the plane into an " interior" region bounded by the curve and an "exterior" region containing all of the nearby and far away exterior ...

s. Duchin's expertise in geometry has led her to conduct research on the mathematics of

. A key aspect of this research is the geometric notion of the

compactness In mathematics, specifically general topology, compactness is a property that seeks to generalize the notion of a closed and bounded subset of Euclidean space by making precise the idea of a space having no "punctures" or "missing endpoints", i ...

of a given political district, a numerical measure that attempts to quantify how extensively gerrymandered it is. “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 ''The Chronicle of Higher Education'' is a newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty and student affairs professionals (staff members and administrators). A subscription is required to rea ...

''. 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. As a part of this project, she founded a summer program to train mathematicians to become expert witnesses in related legal cases. 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

process in the US. In 2018-2019 she took a leave of absence from Tufts, and was a Fellow at the

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University—also known as the Harvard Radcliffe Institute—is a part of Harvard University that fosters interdisciplinary research across the humanities, sciences, social sciences, arts, a ...

at Harvard University. Her research focus was "Political Geometry: The Mathematics of Redistricting". In 2018, Governor of

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

Tom Wolf Thomas Westerman Wolf (born November 17, 1948) is an American politician and businessman serving as the 47th governor of Pennsylvania since 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, he defeated Republican incumbent Tom Corbett in the 2014 guber ...

enlisted Duchin to help him evaluate newly drawn redistricting maps for fairness. This happened as a consequence of the

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania is the highest court in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Unified Judicial System. It also claims to be the oldest appellate court in the United States, a claim that is disputed by the Massachusetts Supreme ...

decision which declared the state's 2011 US congressional districting map to be unconstitutional. Duchin prepared a report published on February 15, 2018. , 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 Mobile may refer to: Places * Mobile, Alabama, a U.S. port city * Mobile County, Alabama * Mobile, Arizona, a small town near Phoenix, U.S. * Mobile, Newfoundland and Labrador Arts, entertainment, and media Music Groups and labels * Mobile ( ...

and Montgomery together, therefore complementing the one Black and blue-leaning district in the state with a second one.

Awards and honors

In 2016 Duchin was named as a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

"for contributions to geometric group theory and Teichmüller theory, and for service to the mathematical community". She was also a

Mathematical Association of America The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) is a professional society that focuses on mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university, college, and high school teachers; graduate and undergraduate students; pure a ...

Distinguished Lecturer for that year, speaking on the mathematics of

voting system An electoral system or voting system is a set of rules that determine how elections and referendums are conducted and how their results are determined. Electoral systems are used in politics to elect governments, while non-political elections ma ...

s. In 2018 she was awarded a

Guggenheim fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

References

External links

Home page (Tufts University)

Curriculum vitae, including list of publications

PhD dissertation
{{DEFAULTSORT:Duchin, Moon Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians Harvard College alumni University of Chicago alumni Tufts University faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society 21st-century women mathematicians American LGBT scientists Stamford High School (Stamford, Connecticut) alumni 21st-century American women LGBT mathematicians LGBT academics