Political Geometry: Rethinking Redistricting in the US with Math, Law, and Everything In Between

by Moon Duchin (Editor), Olivia Walch (Editor)

“Why does my congressional district look like a salamander?” Politically engaged citizens have been asking this question for far too long. This volume collects perspectives from a wide cross-section of disciplines to explain what drives gerrymandering, why it can be hard to stamp out, and how we might go about fixing it. With topics ranging from the Voting Rights Act to Markov chains to the geography of communities, this book serves as a 21st century toolkit for how we can better approach this corrosive phenomenon.

The volume editors gather experts from a variety of fields to provide as many different perspectives on gerrymandering as possible. Thanks to the breadth of expertise found across these chapters, ranging from lawyers to mathematicians to civil rights activists, readers will discover new ways of thinking about redistricting in the United States. Illustrations and helpful walkthroughs appear throughout to clearly explain otherwise complex ideas from these areas. Political Geometry is a must-have for anybody interested in political representation in the United States elections, and for anyone who’s ever thought, “There must be a better way to do this.”

Genres: Politics

477 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2022

About the author

Moon Duchin, Ph.D. (Mathematics, University of Chicago, 2005; M.S., Mathematics, U. Chicago, 1999; B.A., Mathematics & Women’s Studies, Harvard University, 1998), is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and serves as founding director of the interdisciplinary Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Tufts University. Her mathematical research is in low-dimensional topology, geometric group theory, and dynamics. She leads a research team called the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG) that studies novel applications of geometry and topology to redistricting problems. Previously she was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

Duchin is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and holds a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to study geometry at the intermediate scale between metric spaces and their asymptotic limits, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. She has lectured widely in pure mathematics and has spoken on the geometry of redistricting to audiences from high schools to a rabbinical school to the Distinguished Lecture Series of the Mathematical Association of America.