Ken Wright doesn’t think politics is rocket science, but it could be improved quite a bit with math, geometry and physics. Today it’s driven by political science.

Ken is the founder and the 88-year-old chief thinker at the venerable Denver firm of Wright Water Engineers. He unraveled the Incas’ hydraulic wonders at the lost city of Machu Picchu, and he co-authored a book about it. He did the same at Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado.

So if anybody could figure out the lines and curves of Colorado’s political districts, it should be Ken. He did it before. He handed lawmakers and the courts a tool to extract some of the politics from of the art of redistricting in 1982.

The same year Flock of Seagulls  hit the charts with “I Ran,” Colorado Republicans tried to force three incumbent Democrats to run against each other in a proposed Senate district. Ken was hired to come up with a formula to measure the political compactness of a district, one of the most important features lawmakers are supposed to consider (instead of political advantage). Compactness means designing the district so most of the constituents live as close together as possible, not a handful over here and a handful over there to politically stack the deck.

One of Ken’s friends, Barbara Holme, was one of those “three good Democrats,” as he called them. Holme also happened to be the Senate minority leader at the time, which meant using redistricting to help her lose was good motivation for the Republican majority, or at least an enjoyable byproduct. It was only coincidental that Ken’s wife, lawyer and environmental policy champ Ruth Wright, served in the House of Representatives, he said.

After legislators knotted up over the partisan plan 35 years ago, the Colorado Reapportionment Commission used Ken’s formula, which the Colorado Supreme Court cited as correct when it blessed the resulting district boundaries.

Ken injected the polar moment of inertia to redistricting. After I took several flailing stabs at getting it, he explained it to me in an e-mail a few days later using a picture of a skater spinning in a tight circle.

“‘Moment of inertia’ measures how tightly or loosely grouped an object’s mass is around its center,’ he wrote in the e-mail. “Spinning figure skaters can reduce their moment of inertia by pulling in their arms, allowing them to spin faster due to conservation of angular momentum.”

Districts should strive for that kind of communal inertia, Ken and the courts agreed. Partisanship in the current system just makes people dizzy.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear plenty about redistricting in the case of Gill v. Whitford, which looks at whether Wisconsin Republicans showed their political hand when they redrew districts in 2011. The shady practice is called gerrymandering, which doesn’t exist, if you ask any incumbent officeholder who benefits from it.

Gerrymandering is like having a Sasquatch sleeping on your sofa. Yeah, it’s obvious and smells bad, but if it’s yours you hate to get rid of it.

How obvious?

Only four of the 65 seats in the Colorado House have a puncher’s chance of flipping from one party to the other because of the way the boundaries are drawn, according to Fair Districts Colorado, a bipartisan coalition that hopes to ask voters next year to put the map-drawing in the hands of an independent commission, as other states have done.

Opponents cite earnest concerns.

Communities of interest can pick up a few seats in the existing process. Those interests have no voice at all, however, in other non-competitive districts. Tough luck if you’re a minority living there. Those who differ argue that without pooling these communities they might not have enough votes to pick up any seats at all. That doesn’t seem likely in the Colorado legislature, however. The membership is diverse in race and gender, as well as a strong LGBTQ coalition, from the back bench to the leadership. It’s hard to imagine a benefit of gerrymandering, other than to whet a partisan edge which, in turn, insures gridlock, because candidates fear the extremist primary voters in their own party more than a fairly fought general election.

Gerrymandered districts are a short-term answer to a long-term question for the General Assembly. Competitive districts would tell us how far Colorado has come as an electorate on diversity in leadership, whether the field is politically engineered or not. I bet we’ve come pretty far. Some politicos aren’t willing to risk it.

But don’t hire Ken Wright to engineer a mathematical solution to those political angles.

“I would say I’m not ready to tell you about that,” he said, when I asked for a solution to rigged representation. “I’m not that kind of an expert.”