Word: mathes
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...have a feeling it is more or less the same part of my brain which does both [math and music]," reflects Elkies, "they speak to the same place, the same aesthetic...
...Elkies, it is the fundamental simplicity of math and music which lend them their inherent beauty. A stark, basic principle underpins even the most complex symphony or mathematical application, he says...
Professor of Mathematics Mark W. McConnell, who sings and plays the flute, offered a historical approach to the question. Math and music, he says, share a common history which dates back to ancient Greece. Pythagoras, famous for his theorum on triangles, is also considered to be a pioneer in music theory...
...Pythagoras first developed the idea that the ratio between two musical pitches should be a rational number," McConnell explains. "Some people consider him to be the founder of both math and music...
...late Middle Ages, however, music theorists began to experiment with non-rational intervals to enhance aesthetic appeal. "Musicians began to be disillusioned with the rigidness of the mathematical structure," McConnell says. "Math and music began to diverge--each culture began to build up its own world, with its own great people and its own great ideas...finally the two 'worlds' became separate...