Moon Duchin

Moon Duchin
Residence United States
Nationality American
Alma mater Harvard University, University of Chicago
Known for Research in geometric group theory and the mathematics of gerrymandering
Awards Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, Guggenheim Fellowship
Scientific career
Fields Mathematics
Institutions Tufts University
Thesis Thin triangles and a multiplicative ergodic theorem for Teichmüller geometry (2005)
Doctoral advisor Alex Eskin

Moon Duchin is an American mathematician who works as an associate professor at Tufts University. Her mathematical research concerns geometric topology, geometric group theory, and Teichmüller theory.[1] She is also interested in the history of science,[1] and is one of the core faculty members of Tufts's Science, Technology, and Society program.[2]

Duchin has developed a long-term, wide-ranging project on the mathematics of gerrymandering.[3] As a part of this project, she founded a summer program to train mathematicians to become expert witnesses in related legal cases.[4][5]

Early life

Duchin was given her first name, Moon, by parents "on the science-y fringes of the hippie classification". She grew up knowing from a young age that she wanted to become a mathematician.[6] As a student at Stamford High School in Connecticut, she completed the regular high school mathematics curriculum in her sophomore year, and continued to learn mathematics through independent study.[6] She was active in math and science camps and competitions and did a summer research project in the geometry of numbers with Noam Elkies.[6]

Education

Duchin went to Harvard University as an undergraduate, where she was active in queer organizing[7] and finished a double major in mathematics and women's studies in 1998.[6][8] As a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Chicago, she continued her feminist activism by teaching gender studies and pushing the university to add gender-neutral bathrooms,[6][9] and was mentioned mockingly by name on the Rush Limbaugh show.[6] She completed her doctorate in 2005, under the supervision of Alex Eskin.[10] She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis and the University of Michigan before joining the Tufts faculty in 2011.[6][8]

Work

Duchin's mathematical research is in geometric topology, geometric group theory, and Teichmüller theory.[1] For example, one of her results is that, for a broad class of locally flat surfaces, the geometry of the surface is entirely determined by the shortest length in each homotopy class of simple closed curves.[11]

Awards and honors

In 2016 Duchin was named as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to geometric group theory and Teichmüller theory, and for service to the mathematical community".[12] She was also a Mathematical Association of America Distinguished Lecturer for that year, speaking on the mathematics of voting systems.[13] In 2018 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.[14]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Faculty profile, Tufts University, accessed December 11, 2016.
  2. ↑ Science, Technology, and Society core faculty, Tufts University, accessed December 13, 2016.
  3. ↑ "Meet the Math Professor Who's Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2017-02-22. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  4. ↑ "Regional Sites – Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group". sites.tufts.edu. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  5. ↑ "A Summer School for Mathematicians Fed Up with Gerrymandering". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Vanderkam, Laura (June 23, 2008), "Blazing a trail for women in math: Moon Duchin", Scientific American .
  7. ↑ Welker, Kristen (December 3, 1994), "Defamatory Poster Appalls Students", The Harvard Crimson
  8. 1 2 Curriculum vitae, accessed December 11, 2016.
  9. ↑ Closeted/OUT in the Quadrangles: A History of LGBTQ Life at the University of Chicago, University of Chicago Libraries, 2015, retrieved December 15, 2016 .
  10. ↑ Moon Duchin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  11. ↑ Technically, "shortest length" here means an infimum of lengths, as there is not generally a single shortest representative curve for the class. See Bowman, Joshua Paul (2011). Review of Duchin, Moon; Leininger, Christopher J.; Rafi, Kasra (2010), "Length spectra and degeneration of flat metrics", Inventiones Mathematicae, 182 (2): 231–277, arXiv:0907.2082, Bibcode:2010InMat.182..231D, doi:10.1007/s00222-010-0262-y, MR 2729268 .
  12. ↑ 2017 Class of the Fellows of the AMS, accessed December 11, 2016.
  13. ↑ Math and the Vote: A Geometer Examines Elections, Mathematical Association of America, accessed December 11, 2016.
  14. ↑ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Moon Duchin". Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved September 5, 2018.
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