Klarinet Archive - Posting 000423.txt from 1999/09

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: [kl] Lecture schedue
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 22:04:48 -0400

College faculty on the KLARINET list. My wife and I are driving
across the U.S. late March and early April, 2000, with 6 lectures
to give, the last on Apr. 15 in Lancaster, PA at the annual
meeting of the American Military Historical Society. The first
5 lectures are to be in Arizona, Texas, Illinois, Indiana, and
Ohio, with all 5 on the same topic: Mozart and Mathematics. A
summary of the talk and its purpose is given below.

I had scheduled 6 repetitions of the Mozart/Mathematicas talk
but scheduling difficulties have caused one college to back out.
That fees up one day between Texas and Illinois somewhere around
April 6 or 7 but not later or earlier.

If the topic and its contents are of interest to you as a
colloqium for BOTH the mathematics and the music departemtns,
contact me privately

==============================================================

The proposed colloquium, "Mozart and Mathematics" is a repetition
of a lecture given at the International Conference on the
Enlightenment held at the University of Dublin in Ireland in July,
1999. The subject matter is directed both to those with
mathematical training and those with an interest in the composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

It poses the hypothesis that Mozart had a very real but completely
unknown and undeveloped mathematical intellect. Considering the
fact that he never had a single day of schooling in his life and
that his mathematical training, provided solely by his father, was
limited only to the basic elements of arithmetic, it is remarkable
that sketches in his hand show him playing, for his own personal
amusement, in one of the most abstract of all mathematical
disciplines, number theory. While the work is of little
mathematical importance, what is remarkable is that, without any
training whatsoever, this extraordinary musical genius, thought by
some to be the most creative musician ever born, occupied and
amused himself in the same discipline that has been at the center
of creative mathematical thought for millenia.

It gives rise to the very old question about a theoretical
relationship between the thought processes of mathematics and those
of music.

The speaker Daniel N. Leeson. Though now retired from an active
business career, Leeson holds degrees in mathematics, was a key
speaker for the Association of Computing Machinery for many years,
author of one of the earliest texts on computer programming, a
performing symphonic musician who played with at least a dozen
professional symphony orchestras, is still one of the world's
leading Mozart scholars, and an editor of the 220 volume complete
edition of the works of Mozart, the Neue Mozart Ausgabe. A report
on this subject of Mozart and Mathematics will appear in the Mozart
Jahrbuch, 1998/99 edition, as published by the Salzburg Mozarteum
in conjunction with the German publishing firm of Baerenreiter,
Kassel.

This lecture was first presented to the combined mathematics and
music departements of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in March,
1999 and will be presented to the Council of College Mathematics
Teachers in Las Vegas in March, 2000.

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

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