Mathematics Events at the 2016 AAAS Meeting

(Left to right: Zomahoun, Hermi, Frederick, and discussant Wayne Patterson of Howard University.)

This symposium was organized by Evans Harrell of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who also organized a team (Harrell, Christina Frederick, and Stephen Malone) that visited two institutes in West Africa and participated in workshops there. Frederick talked about the visits to the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Senegal (one of five such centers) and L'Institut de Mathématiques et de Sciences Physiques in Benin. The worskhops helped establish connections with African mathematicians and scientists that has led to projects modeling the tropical disease schistosomiasis and modeling geological phenomena.

Left to right: Dmitri Tymoczko, Noam Elkies, and David Wright before the start of the symposium.

A big crowd listened to three talks on different facets of the connections between math and music. Noam Elkies, Harvard University, began the symposium by addressing the question of how many pieces of music there are. He explained that he was not seeking an exact number and was not considering every possible arrangement of notes, since most arrangements aren't what people would call music. He gave a lower bound of 10⁴ different measures, so that, for example, there are at least 10⁸⁰⁰ possible pieces of length 200 measures. Elkies finished his talk by playing his 61-measure "Steganographic Étude #1" based on the first 244 digits of pi and added that memorizing the music helped him memorize those digits of pi. During the Q&A, he estimated that there are fewer than a million pieces of music that have been created.

Edward Aboufadel (pictured) of Grand Valley State University organized this symposium, which took place on the last morning of the meeting. The second and third talks focused on mathematics. Andrew Sutherland of MIT talked about the collaborative Polymath Project on bounded gaps between prime numbers. He gave the audience a background on prime numbers and their distribution, and explained how that Polymath project, Polymath 8, worked, based on his experience and contributions to the project. Alison Pease, University of Dundee (Scotland), and her team are using the rich and precise data associated with online collaborations to study how mathematics is done.

AMS Public Awareness Officer Annette Emerson (pictured) and Assistant Director of the AMS Washington Office Anita Benjamin staffed the AMS exhibit, which featured the 2016 Calendar of Mathematical Imagery, Mathematical Moments--a series of over 120 posters that promotes appreciation of the role mathematics plays in science, nature, technology and human culture--the Mathematics and Music poster, a Powered by Math poster, and selected AMS books. Visitors to the exhibit included mathematicians, scientists from many disciplines, press, teachers, and Family Days participants.