Indiana’s GOP-controlled legislature, committed to preserving its supermajority status, held off efforts to establish an independent redistricting commission this year.

But there’s a new angle – literally – to end gerrymandering at the national level.

Moon Duchin, an associate professor of math at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, is applying geometry to redistricting to determine whether a district is compact, a key principle in drawing electoral districts.

“I work on what’s called metric geometry and within that, I already had a series of papers that were about essentially the average distances between points in various kinds of shapes,” Duchin told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “That’s actually directly applicable to compactness. It turns out that if you take a district and you look at the average distances between all of its points, then the bigger that is, the less compact, once you normalize by the diameter. That meant that I already had published theorems that, I think, cast some light on the districting problem.

“Changes to voting rules that used to be considered by courts before they could be implemented are now implemented first and the courts consider them after the fact,” Duchin explained. Because of the increase in challenges to new electoral maps, there’s a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering.

Duchin’s goal is to train those witnesses, beginning with a five-day summer program at Tufts. Announced in late January, more than 900 people had expressed interest by late February.

“What was really remarkable,” Duchin said, “is that the mailing list didn’t say, Sign up if you care about gerrymandering. It said, We want to train mathematicians as expert witnesses. That’s very specific.”

Any Indiana mathematicians out there?