Klarinet Archive - Posting 000522.txt from 1998/04

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: Music and Science
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 12:20:42 -0400

It is serendipitous that this topic should come up at this time.

Not 6 months ago I received a request from the Mozarteum in Salzburg
to examine a newly discovered sketch of music in Mozart's hand. It
was not the music they wanted investigated but rather the page full
of numbers that Mozart had written all over the sheet.

Prior to my investigation, my view of Mozart's interest in science,
and in particular mathematics, was very traditional; i.e., he was
said by his sister to be very good at addition, and the trumpeter
Schachtner said that, as a child, Mozart wrote numbers all over the
floor, the tables, the chairs, the walls, etc.

I puzzled over the page for several days before coming to the
conclusion that this man, who never went to school a day in his
life, who was educated only by his father, and whose entire
education consisted only of how to compose, cipher, and read, had
an interest in the most arcane of mathematical subjects, namely
number theory. Now number theory is very abstract and involves
studying the property of numbers, such as oddness and evenness,
for example.

As a result of my investigations, I went to see two of the world's
leading number theorists at Stanford University, Daniel Bump and
Carl Rubin. They found the work extraordinarily interesting
and original considering his complete lack of any education.

My training is also in mathematics and I was dumbfounded that
Mozart was trying to develop new theora without the slightest
knowledge of the kinds of tools one needs to work in this area.

As a result of this, I have completed a paper called "Mozart and
Mathematics" which will appear in the Mozart Jahrbuch in the
1998/99 edition.

As far as other musicians having such a keen interest in mathematical
theory, I have no personal knowledge but I am told by people
who say that they are in a position to know, that the two
disciplines are often combined in a single individual.

=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
Rosanne Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
=======================================

   
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