Moon Duchin facts for kids

Moon Duchin is an American mathematician. She is a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She is currently on leave from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Her math research looks at shapes, groups, and spaces. She has done important work on the math behind redistricting and gerrymandering. These are ways political maps are drawn.

She started a group called MGGG Redistricting Lab. This group uses math to help make fair political maps in the US. Moon Duchin also studies the history and ideas behind science. She helps lead the Science, Technology, and Society program at Tufts.

Early Life and Learning

Moon Duchin was given her first name by her parents. She knew from a young age that she wanted to be a mathematician. When she was in high school in Stamford, Connecticut, she finished all her math classes early. She kept learning math on her own.

She also went to math and science camps. She did a summer project on the geometry of numbers. This was with a famous mathematician named Noam Elkies.

College and Graduate School

Duchin went to Harvard University for her undergraduate studies. She earned two degrees in 1998. One was in mathematics, and the other was in women's studies. She wrote two separate papers for these degrees.

She then went to the University of Chicago for graduate school. She earned her doctorate degree in mathematics in 2005. Her advisor was Alex Eskin. After that, she worked as a researcher at other universities. She joined the Tufts faculty in 2011.

Her Work in Mathematics

Moon Duchin's math research focuses on different types of geometry. This includes how shapes and groups relate to each other. One of her discoveries is about flat surfaces. She found that the shape of these surfaces is set by the shortest curves on them.

In 2022, Duchin was in a Netflix movie called A Trip to Infinity. In the film, she talked about the math ideas of infinity.

Math and Political Maps

Duchin uses her knowledge of geometry to study gerrymandering. This is when political districts are drawn unfairly. A key part of her research is how "compact" a district is. Compactness is a way to measure how spread out or squiggly a district's shape is. Courts often look for a clear way to measure this.

Duchin has a big project on the math of gerrymandering. She started a summer program to teach mathematicians. They learn how to be experts in legal cases about map drawing.

In 2016, she created the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG). This group does not take sides in politics. It shares research on geometry and computers. This research helps with the redistricting process in the US.

Helping with Fair Maps

From 2018 to 2019, Duchin took time off from Tufts. She was a Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She studied "Political Geometry: The Mathematics of Redistricting."

In 2018, the governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, asked Duchin for help. He needed her to check new political maps for fairness. This happened after a court said the state's old maps were unfair. Duchin wrote a report about the maps on February 15, 2018.

In 2022, judges in Alabama said the state's political maps were unfair. They asked Duchin to help draw new, fairer maps. She created four similar maps. These maps would put cities with many Black and Democratic-leaning voters together. This would create a second district where these voters could have more say.

Awards and Honors

In 2016, Moon Duchin was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. This was for her work in geometry and for helping the math community. That same year, she gave talks about the math of voting systems. In 2018, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

See also

In Spanish: Moon Duchin para niños