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. 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. She is also interested in the history of science, and is one of the core faculty members of Tufts's Science, Technology, and Society program.
Video Moon Duchin
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. 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. She was active in math and science camps and competitions and did a summer research project in the geometry of numbers with Noam Elkies.
Maps Moon Duchin
Education
Duchin went to Harvard University as an undergraduate, where she was active in queer organizing and finished a double major in mathematics and women's studies in 1998. 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, and was mentioned mockingly by name on the Rush Limbaugh show. She completed her doctorate in 2005, under the supervision of Alex Eskin. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis and the University of Michigan before joining the Tufts faculty in 2011.
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". She was also a Mathematical Association of America Distinguished Lecturer for that year, speaking on the mathematics of voting systems.
References
Additional reading
- Najmabadi, Shannon (February 22, 2017), "Meet the Math Professor Who's Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry", The Chronicle of Higher Education . The story concerns a new summer program founded by Duchin, to train mathematicians to become expert witnesses in legal cases involving gerrymandering.
External links
- Home page
- Ph.D. dissertation
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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