Perhaps the best real-life example of a mathematician-musician was Albert Einstein, who was also an accomplished pianist and violinist. It is quite common at evening receptions of large mathematical conferences to be serenaded by concert-quality musical performers, who, in their day jobs, are accomplished mathematicians of some renown. Just as some of the best musicians and composers are “mathematical,” so too many of the best mathematicians are quite musical. Contemporary pianist Glenn Gould, for instance, is equally comfortable and adept playing modern jazz and Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Bach regularly garners the top spot in listings of the greatest composers, typically followed by Mozart and Beethoven.įurther, Bach’s clever, syncopated style led the way to twentieth century musical innovations, notably jazz. The Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) catalogue lists 1128 compositions, from short solo pieces to the magnificent Mass in B Minor (BWV 232) and Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248), far more than any other classical composer. Indeed, in this larger sense, Bach arguably reigns supreme over all classical composers as a “mathematician,” although Mozart is a close second.Ĭertainly in terms of sheer volume of compositions (or even the sheer volume of “mathematical” compositions), Bach reigns supreme. There are even hints of Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio in Bach’s music (see below). Bach had no formal training in mathematics beyond elementary arithmetic.īut, as we will see, Bach was definitely a mathematician in a more general sense, as a composer whose works are replete with patterns, structures, recursions and other precisely crafted features. There is no “Bach convergence theorem” in real analysis, nor is there a “Bach isomorphism theorem” in algebra.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was not a mathematician in a strict sense of the word. Johann Sebastian Bach credit WikimediaOK.
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