The Sound of Mathematics

Keeping it simple

We were talking today at work about holding some lunchtime learning sessions. My colleague offered to give a lecture, this will of course be really interesting, but as an experimentalist physicist his slides usually have lots of equations. I asked if he could keep the equations to a minimum  just to keep most of the audience with him. He agreed this would be possible but he said perhaps to retain interest for the average engineer he could try to animate the equations. I looked this up seems its an old idea equation animation -I guess good mathematicians can read the equations like musicians read the score of complex orchestral piece, they can interpret the notation directly in their head as they read. 

A picture speaks Wordles 

This sparked a thought in which a general audience could benefit from the visualisation of his equations in perhaps a "wordle" type visualistion where the main actors appeared in clouds of different sized text. Dealing even more with abstraction I wonder if it is possible to visualise a set of equations purely by colour. Where repeated numeric constants or functions could be represented by muted or bright tones. If it is possible to view groups of types of equations would they have a distinct patterns of colours. Would the patterns describe anything/mean anything to us.To research these results would we need new disciplines artists/digital retouchers with pantone charts to tell us more about the results from discerning different hues and intensities.

The Sound of Mathematics

Following that train of thought, if we substituted sounds for different, repetitive functions and constants would we be able to hear the difference between a groups of equations from different disciplines, would they sound different - would there be a coherent or recognisable sound. Would we need teams of people with perfect pitch to analyse the differences between the "musical" pieces these groups would
 produce. I am not sure we could say immediately if this would be of any benefit to anyone. I hope we can try this out, I am looking forward to the new lunchtime learning sessions, looking at these equations from my colleague if we are translating these ones to colour maps I may need to bring my sunglasses!.