Monday, December 18, 2023
In an interview with Down Beat magazine, the jazz legend Thelonious Monk once said that “All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.”
For the University of Waterloo Jazz Ensemble, that connection between music and math is explicit. This fall term, there were 16 students and one alum in the Jazz Ensemble. Eight of those students were from the Faculty of Mathematics.
This high percentage of Math students makes perfect sense to David Hao, a computer science major who played piano in the ensemble this term. “Music, boiled down to its essentials, is the combination of sound waves – vibrations – that, when heard, elicit emotion,” he says. “It is a form of mathematical beauty.”
Read the full story from Waterloo News to learn more.
