At first glance, my guest today, Moon Duchen, looks like a fairly typical example of a successful professor of mathematics.

She teaches at Cornell University, having built her academic reputation by working on incredibly abstract ideas in geometry.

But Moon has done something way beyond the typical.

She managed to find a very practical application for her abstract ideas in the area of political gerrymandering.

And since then, she's worked on the ground with state commissions and courts

to transform the way redistricting is done.

We don't have a baseline. We don't know what normal districting looks like. And what the

math folks have brought to the table is better and better methods for sampling from that

huge, unthinkable wilderness of plans.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Moon Dugent first saw the unexpected connection between her geometric research and gerrymandering

when she taught an undergraduate

course on the mathematics of social choice in voting. This is a kind of class assignment every

professor tries to avoid. It's so much work to prepare a new course in an area you aren't already

an expert in, and professors tend to like to teach upper-level courses because there are fewer students

and the material is more challenging. I started our conversation by asking her why she let herself

be drafted to teach an entry-level course far from her area of expertise. Actually, I wasn't so much drafted as I drafted myself.

At the time, I was trying to work my way through the entire undergrad curriculum and teach all of our classes.

Why would you want to go through all of the undergraduate classes?

That sounds like the opposite of what most faculty are trying to do.

It is the opposite.

But I love learning things through teaching them, and I love stretching across the math curriculum.

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