[Maths-Education] Maths-Art Seminars at London Knowledge Lab: Meurig Beynon, 'Making music, making mathematics, and making meaning', 11 December

[Phillip Kent]

*** PLEASE CIRCULATE ** ALL WELCOME **

MAKING MUSIC, MAKING MATHEMATICS, AND MAKING MEANING
*
*An LKL Maths-Art seminar by
Meurig Beynon, University of Warwick
Tuesday 11 December, 6.00 – 7.30pm

*This talk will address the relationship between formal and informal
meanings in music, in mathematics and in computing. Formal notations and
structures have played a prominent role in all three fields – musicologists,
logicians and computer scientists all study meaning as defined by the
interpretation of symbols and forms. At the same time, each field has a rich
and extensive practice that forces us to confront meaning in a much broader
and more informal sense, whether through the extra-musical qualities of
programme music, the aesthetic appeal of a mathematical visualisation, or
the emotional impact of a computer game.

Music, mathematics and computing wrestle with the relationship between the
formal and the informal in different ways. Every performing musician can
relate to Gustav Mahler's observation that "what is most important is not in
the notes". Every educated mathematician appreciates the limitations of
formal logical systems, as witnessed by the failure of the programme in the
last century to "axiomatise" the whole of mathematics and the celebrated
work of Gödel and Turing. Computing, as the least mature of these three
disciplines, strives to stand solidly upon the foundation of formal
mathematics yet is manifest in practice across a vast canvas of human
activity that defies formalisation. The need to go beyond formality is
nowhere more apparent than in the making of music, mathematics and software.
As observed by the mathematician Emile Post in 1941, the negative findings
of Gödel and Turing are proof that "mathematical thinking is, and must be,
essentially creative" and that mathematics must inevitably "return to
meaning and truth".

Thinking about computing technology in a way that goes beyond its recognised
powers to process formalisms motivates an alternative conception of
computing based on using the computer to create "construals" rather than
programs. The notion of a construal is borrowed from David Gooding, a
philosopher of science who introduced it in his studies of the "making of
meaning" in experimental science. Its relevance to the making of mathematics
and music will be illustrated with an elementary study in group theory, and
with a personal construal of Schubert's famous setting of Goethe's poem,
Erlkönig, that highlights the originality of his musical imagination.

*Meurig Beynon is Reader in Computer Science at the University of Warwick,
where he is co-director of the Empirical Modelling Research Group.*

TIME: 6.00 - 7.30pm, Tuesday 11 December 2007
PLACE: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald St, London, WC1N 3QS
[Travel information / Maps at:
http://www.lkl.ac.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=42&Itemid=32]

All welcome. No reservation required, but an email to
lkl.maths.art at gmail.com would be appreciated for planning purposes

*NEXT SEMINAR: January, TBA

Visit the website and seminar archive: http://www.lkl.ac.uk/maths-art
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