Some thoughts on mathematics

Warning: This short post touches on some heavier topics like suicide and relationship violence.  If you are having a mental health emergency, please reach out to a mental health professional, call 911, or a suicide / crisis hotline (in the US, the canonical number is 9-8-8) .  This post is a bare bones version of what I wish I could write here, but I'd rather get something out and maybe revisit topics in more detail later. Math is weird and has weird people in it.  I remember a close friend in college told me he was a math major because he liked the people - I agree (usually).  Mathematical culture seems to really emphasize being accepting of the weirdos, purporting that a love of mathematics is what matters.  Barefoot at a conference - not even an eyeroll.  (I had my barefoot phase in grad school too.)  Blue hair, you do you!  I like having the space to be weird, but of course, how welcome you are treated in the community can depend on race, gender, etc and this affects who really

Sometimes I think about math which is not pure geometry/topology, so I want to discuss some of those areas in this blog as well.  This post was inspired by a recent talk of Moon Duchin in MD4SG and some discussions I had with Jim Allen and Manon Revel.  This is an oversimplification to get the ideas across - there are a lot of important ideas not present in this post.  If you want to learn more, check out Moon's group's  website , which has lots of nice visuals and interactive explanations.  Let me start with the background before getting into the math.  A major source of political conflict comes from gerrymandering .  If you're not familiar with this term, it's roughly the idea of restructuring voting districts to create some kind of political advantage.  I'll explain this a little further through the lens of the US system.  For simplicity, let's assume there are two political parties A and B in a state, which will be divided into voting districts.  For simp