good evening staff or science for the public and i welcome you to contemporary science issues and innovations tonight we consider a problem that has increasingly undermined voter representation over the last couple of decades the  ering a voter justs and along with a description of the problem we learn about new mathematical tools that can help courts a den of five voting maps that are drawn unfairly our guest is professor justin solomon of the department of electrical engineering and computer science at m i t dr solomon is also principal investigator for the geometric data processing group in the computer science and artificial intelligence lab there this summer on a multi university group of mathematicians including dr solomon took on the gerrymander issue the team known as the metric geometry and gerrymandering group has committed to providing tools by which the courts can determine and whether a particular gerrymander fairly represents voters or not this group has gotten a lot of media attention for offering both a clear analysis of the gerrymander problem and the solution so mathematicians to the rescue will learn about the gerrymander problem and the first group to tackle it and the mathematical solution they've come up with we're very honored to welcome just in solving welcome thank you so much it's a pleasure to be here thank you and we if we can start just a little general background on the screen here we see the original gerrymander which was drawn here in massachusetts and it's a part of massachusetts but we just want to show that the audience that it was named for that then governor gary g e r r y and later was mispronounce but you'll see that the design there in the back of this lizard like creature is a like the salamander and therefore that was put together and came up the gerrymandered just so you have that reference of where this all started from so then ask dr solomon like what's the problem with the gerrymander just in general right so so to be a little bit more clear the gerrymandering issue is one of the design of voting districts right so every time the census comes out this process takes place in which we take a map of the united states or more specifically map of individual states they typically don't go across states and each state gets partition into little pieces and these are voting districts so for instance for you know in congress maybe a four hundred thirty five of them yes and so gerrymandering as an issue  is essentially when somebody tries to design the shape of voting districts to achieve a particular outcome for the vote maybe to cluster people together in a particular way to ensure the outcome that they w so it has in this country with the two parties tended to be like in favor of the one over the other and so on it has gotten really disproportionate in the last couple of decades you know that's that's one of many issues actually  so gerrymandering in typically we think about it in terms of seeing a funny shape yes yes it is an issue in potentially with political parties to using their own shapes for their districts of course that's actually in discussion right now in the supreme court yes it's also a civil rights problem yet for example designing districts that are unfair to different under represented minorities and so on and so you know the issue of  gerrymandering touches a lot of people in a lot of different ways and it's largely nonpartisan yeah so really the challenge to overcome here is how to design fair standards for making districts  weird designs this one could you show them to absolutely i mean so here we see for example district two in austin this is in texas and clearly this is a pretty crazy actually up here are all the people that no but it's not necessarily the case for instance civil rights law tells us if you have the opportunity to draw a district maybe gives an under represented group a voice that might actually be preferable even if the shape is not so good and so issues like that complicate the matter that it's not clear just from the shape that you have the full story ok which is why the census is important right the periodic census and figure out where people are and what about divided roughly into different types of groupings so there is blocs groups and tracks tracks being the pricing untypically although not always unfortunately and specially redistricting is an exception to every rule it's very uncommon to take a census block and divide it up sometimes the trucks are but even the typically you're voting districts include either all or nothing with the different units so really these are the basic units of ends up in court and we have had several cases now and we understand that the justices often feel like this is to complicate our head at so we had the supreme court justice the chief thing to look at a map and somehow into it the shape of a dish is unfair it's a very different thing if i put you on the stand and ask you to testify in very clear language precisely what law you're violating and why  so when we talk about fairness of distorting plants oftentimes the law is either very very difficult to implement in a numerical or a quantitative way and we're relying a lot on people's intuition place and then we have to look at your equipment your mathematical equipment right would mathematicians be interested in this well fundamentally redistricting is a geometry problem right at the end of the day you're given a map of the united states or of an individual state and your job is to partition that map into individual pieces and typically you do that by considering a number of criteria you know there's certainly one guiding principle is that you expect write whether that means somehow designing the districts so that the outcome of the vote is representative of the proportion of the people that are there or whether the shape of the district somehow follows boundaries of city law in them and other geographical features  you consider to be sort of significant in the process of drawing shapes on the map could be a little subjective absolutely well date and so i think was what mathematicians and computer scientists like myself are really trying to study are questions like what does it mean given even extremely clear criteria can you find the best possible districting or if i give you a plan can i argue in  in completely clear fashion that the plan is fair or unfair right and so sensually i think mothers are very excited to realize that there are a lot of open up medical problems with real ramifications for the way that we be kind of exciting to look at this absolute but the the the technique some of the techniques that have been used that appeared like in articles and so on  packing there were some others and what do you can you just give us a brief idea of what some of that means sure so so packing and cracking are sort of two means by which people can gerrymander incidentally when we us way that every single member or as many members as possible of that one minority group or in all in that single district and so in that case what happens well maybe they win that district but then essentially you've taken those votes which your voting districts in a fashion where every district gets forty nine percent for example of the group that you're trying to you know disadvantage so in that case what you've done is you crack to the vote among many districts where maybe if you draw on the lines differently they would have gotten a representative of their ok right and see the these are sort of to extract in the world of redistricting that are sort of techniques that you might use as an adversary to  to design arguably bad but certainly unfair plans or are not representative right but at the end of the day it means that even though you go to the polls and you cast your vote there are many ways in which that instance there are some cases just by virtue of the way our voting system works that make it extremely difficult even if you have the best of intentions to pull off some sense of fair vote so for instance let's say the my state has  representatives and i have ten percent of my state is from a particular under represented group unfortunately and let's say furthermore obviously you know mathematicians you love to make the right let's say that everybody votes on a single issue maybe in single issue vote so roughly every district in my state ten percent of the vote in that district gets you know contributed to one group and ninety percent is going to another so how many representatives do i get for that  even though i had ten districts and i have ten percent of my state in a particular group that outcome is not the one that i god but if that ten percent was uniformly distributed throughout the state right those people are just spread oh there's actually no way i could draw the lines and a e some representation from it and that's what makes talking about this so difficult right that we actually don't understand the boundaries in this case a mathematical boundaries determine sort of what plans are possible which is extremely many respects and so along comes the mathematicians do you all see this looking at these maps as fundamentally a geometric problem in the first place i mean is that the way you look at it or it just it's a great question and so i think it's actually sort of if you look over over the years in the past decades we're certainly not the first people in the computational or mathematical world to look at gerrymandering i think the difference and really what we're trying to emphasize in our effort is a few things one is that it's purely nonpartisan and another is that we really want a realistic understanding to be destroyed and what that means for example is very attractive to a person like me who has a ph d in geometry you distribute committees when to understand the parameters of his mathematical problems in a realistic fashion and so that i think our hope is really the thrust of our new effort right is to create a realistic understanding of the mathematical community of what problems need to be solved can simultaneously help people on the legal side understand why these are really difficult in some cases open mathematical challenges that need to be addressed before we can come up with totally on a i like the engine yes right but it understand that that was started out as a workshop there and you have no mathematician but you have more than mathematicians in there and with the objective of developing the tools for the legal process of to help the legal people out and in a nonpartizan fashion absolutely so it's a nonpartisan group has a couple different so one of them is definitely on the research side which is to understand in clear mathematical but also in a realistic fashion the challenges of political redistricting but we also have a for it's an education for instance so ea ch of our workshops includes a track for high school teachers and also college and structures instructors to develop material to talk about these kinds of issues with their students grey both in math and yes if it  and we also have a track for teaching mathematicians to understand the expert witness in process what it would take to actually for example testify in a court case and and try to argue that a plan is fair or unfair this is really fantastic because you're merging the civic side with the including the legal and with with the mathematical side ok so there you are with your yummy maps and your big issues in front of you how do you look at this how do you analyze it what kinds of tools do you bring in did you say they are recent goes absolutely so i'll give my perspective as a cleaner sign to write of course our our team includes you know everybody from theoreticians in metric geometry to people like me who work with computers on a daily so from my perspective what's really interesting is to understand both the role in the limitations of using a computer in the red process and also in the process of arguing for or against just plan i say so for instance computer science has an entire area called complexity theory which is understanding if you give me the description of a problem can i expect a computer to be able to solve it well or efficiently and one of the things is very well known about the redistricting problem in the tiniest bit depressing is that it's very clearly in the category of problems that are the legislature would do any better than solving the problem yes and so the way i would my group has been trying to understand is how can you develop a relationship between the humans that are doing the redistricting and probably have a good the combat side now if i was it it comes up with additional to plan you know for instance that when the twenty twenty census comes out on the road and you know these lines are going to be movement and we have to give people an arsenal of tools to argue for or against the and that it is self is actually an open challenge for instance in many places the existence of a better plan is not in itself a way to argue against supply in other words you don't so for instance maybe i have a supercomputer yeah and the supercomputers job in life is just to draw not just one distracting plan and millions or billions of them all that follow the rules and now i look at all of those millions of plan and i you got when your computer sampled you know in the space of all these you know plans of all the rules so this is a really interesting idea because it gives you so notion of intel right when you tell them is that it would be very unlikely that certainly is that you can present to the core of this that this would look really bad i mean this is this doesn't work and i can back that up so that this other things not seems to me that this is a very powerful computational thing is that true and is that part of the reason why it's new or is it the technique that you were both oh absolutely yeah i mean essentially advances in computer equipment are one of the big reasons why we're revisiting a lot right so for instance just i'm a product i mentioned to you if i want to generate millions of distracting i better have a really good computer that can do that fast and in a fair is really critical for exploring the space of ways that you can partition the map in an efficient fashion so again you know if you kind of going back to there being positive a negative way to time the negative way would be this is a quick way to hopefully we like maybe i put the map out to all of my friends and i asked them to all draw plans and this is one way to both involve everybody in the their daughter ryan to just reveal different things that right is right or when we think they don't with that with that particular program they wouldn't necessarily have to be a computer scientist for us that they don't have to be a professional where they need to be able to put in the data and then the computer will do the work for you it's a move engineers of the legislature are the ones that load it and then your job is really legislatures are going to courts and being able to say now that here's the plan i mean here are the designs that work absolutely so i mean i think really are plan is you know which is uncommon in the redistricting for helping people fight against plans or on yes in the meantime even leading up to that would you have enough to be able like the wisconsin the pennsylvania the north carolina the cases that have been brought to the courts now and spring in court looking at this i guess with the wisconsin one that you can say you have something look we can show you whether something is really fair or unfair whether you're preserving communities of interest as a legal term that appears a lot have yes right all these things are important and different measures have different properties that might be positive or negative yes it sounds as though it might be dynamic also rather than german ring problem i think the consensus among not just members of our group with the mathematical community more probably there's more under the nodes at this point yes and they're worthy of nonpartisan  yes right right that's really a very exciting development you really in the commitment behind it is being nonpartisan and trying to be fair to all and involving all kinds of people and reaching out to the pockets of just a spectacular move thank you i'm hoping that you you know inspire everybody before we close you do a whole bunch of things and i asked if  would just sort of casually mention few of the things you have very broad interests and talents would you as an inspiration to young people everywhere because we usually think of people in math or computer science as being know whatever it is their field it's extremely narrow for and this seems to be giving way now to more comprehensive approaches the things would you please tell us some of the exciting things that you do oh god i don't know  know and i think at cern they had like three orchestras well you know one of the things that really struck me when i moved to the boston area was just with the music number of community groups and yes the quality and the level of competitive processing of geometric data so for instance if i'm a self driving car or a robot and i have some sensor that's collecting information about the shapes around me one of the big problems that we study is all about how can you carry out inference and understanding on  right can i recognize the objects around me and use that information to inform how i interact with the world in the other hand we talk about geometric data processing which involves geometric techniques like what we might learn about in geometry class in high right so hiding inside of this research is really exciting for me because we deal with everything from the low level kind of mathematical ideas from differential geometry from numerical analysis which where my textbook is from a excited yes well i sure that lab is going to be very famous for us and so on i wish you all the best i thank you for giving us your time and explain this thing and i hope will talk to you again about some of your other work which is all very exciting thank you very much thank you