Saturday 28 March 2009

My Most Recent Book Purchase


Michio Kaku, the author is a renowned Theoretical Physicist who frequently appears in the Discovery science channel. 

Saturday 21 March 2009

The Music of Numbers

Something that I discovered a few days ago just proved that mathematics and nature are closely and inseparably entwined with each other. 
It all started when I developed an interest for a certain sequence called the Fibonacci Sequence. I'd been fiddling around with it for quite some time when on March the 7th one brilliant idea struck me as I was waking up in the morning. Why not relate the sequence to the musical notes  A B C D E F and G? I immediately grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down the first few numbers of the Fibonacci sequence and started working out their corresponding musical notes. After working out the first 5 notes, I asked my brother to play them on the keyboard for me.  Astonishingly, the sequence did not create noise as I had expected but recognizable music! You can imagine my surprise; and I don't even know anything about music other than the 7 notes.  
I then proceeded to work out the rest of the sequence and six others as well, but in all of them the notes after the first five did not sound very much like music to me. 
A few days later, I told my good friend ECYL about the music sequence just to see if the music I created had any substance in it. I had yet another surprise when she told me that the whole sequence of notes represents an entire recognisable music sequence. In other words, I had made music with math. 
The very next day I ran a few searches on Google to see whether anybody had discovered the sequence before me. I felt quite elated after 1 hour of searching revealed nothing alike. I was beginning to think I had made a really big discovery, but I was wrong. After a few well worded searches in Google Scholar, I unearthed a long lost research paper on Fibonacci Pitch Sets written by someone called Casey Mongoven. 
I was a bit disappointed at first, but then I realized the implications of what had just happened. I had actually discovered something a university scholar had all by myself! It just proves that I have the right mindset for research. 
So I am now searching for another topic to research on.