Using SONGS to teach STEM -- online conference

     A recent email from Greg Crowther has let me know of an upcoming conference that looks to be LOTS OF FUN -- an interdisciplinary virtual conference on the use of song in teaching STEM subjects.  The conference is "VOICES: Virtual Ongoing Interdisciplinary Conferences on Educating with Song"  -- the dates are Sept. 27-28, 2017, the conference is entirely online, the registration cost is $10.  Early registration is encouraged to allow time for preparation and submission of presentation proposals.

     Song lyrics often are poetry and in this blog we have included lyrics on a variety of occasions.  Here are links to several lyrics featured herein.
          "The Derivative Song" by Tom Lehrer,
           Lines from "Mandlebrot Set" by Jonathan Coulton,
          "Circle Song" and lines from "Hotel Infinity"  by Larry Lesser (who is one of the featured VOICES speakers),
          "Questions You Can't Ever Decide" and two others by Bill Calhoun.

Songs of mathematics . . .

     Larry Lesser is a songwriter who uses lyrics for teaching as well as entertainment.  A varied sample of his creations for doing this are presented in his article "Mathematical lyrics;  noteworthy endeavours in education" found in the "Poetry and Mathematics / Special Issue" of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, March-June 2014).
     One of the article's enchanting items is a song for children -- "Circle Song" -- which Lesser has written to the familiar tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"; this lyric offers a way to remember critical formulas for a circle.

Circle Song     by Lawrence Mark Lesser

Take your finger 'round the jar:
Circumf'rence equals 2πr!  

Math fun with song lyrics

Song-writer Bill Calhoun is a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics at Pennsylvania's Bloomsburg University (where I also hung out for many years). He belongs, along with colleagues Erik Wynters and Kevin Ferland, to a band called "The Derivatives."  And Bill has granted permission for me to include several of his math lyrics (parodies) here. (In this previous post, we consider the connection between song parodies and mathematical isomorphism.)  My first Calhoun selection deals with difficult mathematical questions concerning classification of infinite sets and decidability.  Following that, later lyrics consider proving theorems and finding derivatives.

Questions You Can’t Ever Decide*      by Bill Calhoun

(These lyrics match the tune of  "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by Lennon and McCartney.)

Picture yourself in  a world filled with numbers,
But the numbers are really just words in disguise.
Gödel says “How can you prove you’re consistent,
If you can’t tell that this is a lie?”    

Kaplansky sings Kaplansky (and Pi)

     I first knew of mathematician Irving Kaplansky (1917-2006) through his monograph, Infinite Abelian Groups -- it was one of my texts for a graduate seminar (with Gene Levy) at the University of Oklahoma in the 1960s.  Later I knew Kaplansky as a songwriter, author of new lyrics for "That's Entertainment."  Kaplansky's adaptation, "That's Mathematics," dedicated to his former student, math-musician-songwriter Tom Lehrer, and to his daughter, singer Lucy Kaplansky, is given below.
      In 1999, in Science News, writer Ivars Peterson (now Director of Publications for the MAA -- Mathematical Association of America) wrote an article about Kaplansky's songwriting in which he mentions  his daughter, Lucy Kaplansky, a singer who frequently performs her father's songs.  A YouTube recording of Lucy singing "The Song of Pi" (in which there is a correspondence between musical notes and the first fourteen digits of pi) is available here.  (Lyrics for "The Song of  Pi" and information about the correspondence are available in Peterson's article.)

Four colors will do

     As I work with Gizem Karaali, an editor of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, to plan a reading of mathematical poetry at the JMM (Joint Mathematics Meetings) in Boston on 6 January 2012, my thoughts return to a poetry reading that I helped to organize at JMM in Baltimore in 1992. One of the participants was a friend and former colleague, Frank Bernhart, whose work is guided by the rhythm pattern of a well-known song.
     Bernhart is an expert on the Four-Color Theorem and his poem celebrates its history -- including consideration of its proof (in 1976) by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken. (The theorem asserts that any map drawn on a flat surface or on a sphere requires only 4 colors to ensure that no regions sharing a boundary segment have the same color.)