Title: Geometry in the Courtroom,
Abstract: There has been a recent media blitz on a cohort of mathematicians valiantly
working to fix America's democratic system by combatting gerrymandering with
geometry. While statistics commonly features in the courtroom (forensics, DNA
analysis, etc.), the gerrymandering news raises a natural question: in what
other ways has pure math, specifically geometry and topology, been involved in
court cases and legal scholarship? In this survey article, we collect a few
examples with topics ranging from the Pythagorean formula to the Ham Sandwich
Theorem, and we discuss some jurists' perspectives on geometric reasoning in
the legal realm. One of our goals is to provide math educators with engaging
real-world instances of some abstract geometric concepts.