"Political Geometry," Tufts Mathematics Professor Moon Duchin

Constitution Day: "What Do Shapes Have To Do with Fair Electoral Representation?” Moon Duchin, Assoc. Prof. of Mathematics, Director, Science, Technology & Society Program, Tufts

September 19, 2017
5 pm - 6 pm
Location
Room 003, Rockefeller Center
Sponsored by
Rockefeller Center
Audience
Public
More information
Joanne Needham
603-646-2207

Moon Duchin earned her BA in Mathematics and Women's Studies from Harvard University, and her MS and PhD in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. She is currently an Associate Professor of Mathematics and the founding Director of the Program in Science, Technology & Society at Tufts University, which spans scholarly approaches to putting science in social context. In math, her work is in low-dimensional geometric topology, geometric group theory, and dynamics. She recently did a YouTube video, Math and the Vote: Voting is actually a really hard math problem: how do you fairly aggregate the preferences of millions of people into a single authoritative outcome?  Her video weaves together math, politics, and civil rights to tell a collection of different stories clustered around the idea of "one person, one vote."

She has also worked and lectured on issues in the history, philosophy, and cultural studies of math and science, such as the role of intuition and the nature and impact of ideas about genius. She is involved in a range of educational projects in mathematics: a veteran visitor at the Canada/USA Mathcamp for talented high school students; middle school teachers in Chicago Public Schools, developer of inquiry-based coursework for future elementary school teachers at the University of Michigan, and briefly a partner with the Poincaré Institute for Mathematics Education at Tufts.

Location
Room 003, Rockefeller Center
Sponsored by
Rockefeller Center
Audience
Public
More information
Joanne Needham
603-646-2207