CELEBRITY FRIDAY: LGBT Mathematician Moon Duchin Wins Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship

Moon Duchin is an out lesbian mathematics professor at Tufts University who has just become the sole pure mathematician in the 2018 class of Guggenheim Fellows. Here's the official announcement:

Moon Duchin is a mathematician at Tufts University, where she is also a Senior Fellow in the Tisch College of Civic Life and serves as the founding director of the interdisciplinary program in Science, Technology, and Society. She majored in Mathematics and Women's Studies at Harvard and received her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. 

Duchin's research in pure math lies in geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology, and dynamics. An area of particular interest is nilpotent geometry, or the shape of groups that fail to be commutative in a controlled way. She has studied random walks, random groups, and rigidity theorems for surfaces and billiards. She is also interested in the social studies of science, particularly the role of expertise, authority, intuition, and proof. 

Duchin is currently engaged in a long-term project on the geometry of gerrymandering, an application of mathematics to civil rights. She has worked to build a national network of collaborators doing wide-ranging work on mathematical and computational interventions in electoral redistricting. They aim to engage the legal, political, and philosophical dimensions of the gerrymandering problem, working closely with civil rights organizations. Duchin recently served as a consultant for the governor of Pennsylvania in the court-mandated push to redraw the congressional map.

I know Moon relatively well, having spent a 3 days attending the latest Geometry of Redistricting Workshop at the University of San Francisco last month. I'm not surprised she has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, I think that she should also be considered for an even more prestigious award, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, in the near future.

Congrats, Moon!

LOOK: Easiest Visual Explanation of Gerrymandering

The United States Supreme Court had oral arguments in the case of Gill v. Whitford which is about partisan gerrymandering. This sounds boring, but it is fundamentally about the nature of Democracy itself. The image above shows how one can use gerrymandering to completely warp democratic results.

The example shows a "state" with 50 voters where 60% of voters are "blue" and 40% are "red" but through selection of district boundaries one can get results of 5 blue districts and 0 red districts to 2 Blue districts and 3 red districts even though using a "standard" redistricting one would expect 3 blue and 2 red.

This case is from Wisconsin where:

The plans, developed in 2011 by Republican leaders who controlled the legislature and signed by Gov. Scott Walker (R), were effective.

In the election held after the new district maps were adopted,Republican candidates won 48.6 percent of the statewide vote but captured a 60-to-39 seat advantage in the State Assembly. 

Evidence uncovered during lawsuits over the redistricting found that models showed Democrats would have to win about 53 percent of the statewide vote to capture a bare majority of the seats.

The swing vote (as usual) is Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Hat/tip to Wonk Blog

SATURDAY POLITICS: Duke Mathematicians Show How Heinously NC Republicans Gerrymandered Congressional Districts

This is an interesting study from two Duke mathematicians which demonstrates the truly heinous nature of the partisan gerrymander perpetrated by North Carolina Republicans to gain a majority of the state's Congressional districts despite getting a minority of votes.

During the 2012 elections in North Carolina, Republicans took nine of the state’s 13 U.S. House seats although 51 percent of the two-party vote went to Democratic candidates. 

The gerrymandering that led to these results isn’t unique to North Carolina or any specific party. Both Democrats and Republicans have used it for political advantage over the years. However, new technology makes it possible to draw partisan districts with increasing precision.

[...] 

They used a statistical algorithm to randomly redraw the boundaries of North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts. The model produced thousands of versions of the redrawn map. All of them were based only on the legal requirements of redistricting, ensuring the districts represented roughly equal numbers of voters and were as geographically compact as possible, without accounting for race or political affiliation.

[...] 

After re-running the election 100 times, with a randomly drawn nonpartisan map each time, the average simulated election result was 7 or 8 U.S. House seats for the Democrats and 5 or 6 for Republicans. The maximum number of Republican seats that emerged from any of the simulations was eight. The actual outcome of the election -- four Democratic representatives and nine Republicans – did not occur in any of the simulations. 

Feel free to re-read that again. Using ONE HUNDRED simulations of randomly drawn district lines but the same votes cast in the 2012 election NONE of those simulations produced the results of the actual 2012 election results of 9 Republicans and 4 Democrats, while the most likely simulated result was between 7 and 8 Democrats and 6 or 5 Republicans.

This result demonstrates how heinously the Republican legislature gerrymandered North Carolina's congressional districts to thwart the political will of the majority of voters.