Harmonious excursions in mathematics

Niven Lecture

Graduation day Niven lecture; graduating students and their guests are especially invited. No sign up necessary.

About the Niven Lectures: Ivan Niven was a famous number theorist and expositor; his textbooks won numerous awards, have been translated into many languages and are widely used to this day. Niven was born in Vancouver in 1915, earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at UBC in 1934 and 1936 and his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1938. He was a faculty member at the University of Oregon from 1947 until his retirement in 1982. The annual Niven Lecture Series, held at UBC since 2005, is funded in part through a generous bequest from Ivan and Betty Niven to the UBC Mathematics Department.

The pursuit of mathematics and music are truly universal human endeavours. Unsurprisingly, there are deep and beautiful connections between music, the design of musical instruments, and many fields of mathematics. The interplay between the shape of an instrument, its fundamental tone and subsequent harmonics has been a source of fascination over most of human history. It has lead to, and been enriched by, deep ideas in several areas of mathematics. And these ideas, in turn, have influenced scientific progress in other disciplines. In this talk we start with an exploration of the connections between music and mathematics, surveying some of the beautiful ideas inspired in the latter by the former.