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As you might imagine, it is possible to consider this as a purely mathematical problem and to thereby come up with measures of gerrymandered-ness. It is a widely studied field. e.g.:

https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/h...

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthew_Dube/publicatio...

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The reason it's so fascinating though, is that because it is a many-variable optimization problem where 1) many of the variables conflict and 2) we haven't actually agreed on the desired optimum. In the end it still very much has a "you know it when you see it" quality, and nobody has come up with math that definitively says "yes this is" or "no this isn't".

Actually, it's maybe a little like spam filtering.

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