The Undergraduate Mathematics Seminar in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh is pleased to offer the following public talk on Math and Music by Professor Neal Bushaw, Ph.D., Virginia Commonwealth University.
Zoom Link (Slides and Audio Only): https://pitt.zoom.us/j/94167428125, Meeting ID: 941 6742 8125, Passcode: 232630
William Pitt Union 540
Notes
Neal Bushaw is associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at Virginia Commonwealth University. Prior to his 2017 arrival in Richmond, he was a grade school student in Bremerton Washington, an undergrad in Boulder, a grad student in Bellingham and Memphis, a postdoc in Tempe and Rio de Janeiro, and a frequent guest of Trinity College Cambridge.
His research interests center around “easy problems” — problems that are easy to state and think about, but difficult to solve. Mostly these problems lie within extremal graph theory and combinatorics. He is also interested in expressing this mathematics in diverse ways, exploring its interactions with art and music in recent work. In his spare time, he enjoys listening to / making / thinking about music, doing mathematics in public, and spending time in the outdoors.
Abstract or Additional Information
What is a musical chord, to a discrete mathematician? What about a scale, or a rhythm? In this talk, we explore these (and other) mathematical versions of musical notions, with a focus on problems that seem like combinatorics. How many scales or chords are there with some specified property? How can we measure a scale, chord, or rhythm? Can we enumerate all chords (and thus find Leonard Cohen's Secret Chord along the way)?
Can we use any of this to make drum machines? We'll see surprising connections between these musical notions, and glimpse the tip of a mathematical iceberg which began with the study of wealth inequality by Muirhead and Lorenz in the early twentieth century, and which was later expanded by mathematical titans Schur, Littlewood, Hardy, and Poly\'a.
This talk is intended for a general audience -- no background in either music theory or combinatorics is expected! This talk includes joint work with Viktoriya Bardenova, Brent Cody, Paul Fay, Luke Freeman, Chris Leffler, Maya Tennant, and Toby Whitaker.