Quantifying Gerrymandering or A Mathematician goes to court

In October 2017, I found myself testifying for hours in a Federal court. I had not been arrested. Rather I was attempting to quantify gerrymandering using a mathematical analysis which grew from asking if a surprising 2012 election was in fact, surprising. It hinged on probing the geopolitical structure of North Carolina using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm. I will start at the beginning and describe the mathematical ideas involved in our analysis. The talk will lead to an interesting question in high dimensional sampling. This work is the result of a team effort by a number of researcher's at Duke including a number of undergraduates. The court case Rucho vs Common Cause is set to be heard by the US Supreme Court on March 26, 2019.