Fun with Maths

It's Exam time at home... My elder son currently doing his Prelims before his tenth standard board exams.... and the younger one in Grade Four. 

And as I opened up the Economic Times this morning, this article - Fun With Maths just jumped out at me....

Manjul Bhargava is the first person of Indian origin to have won the coveted Fields medal in Mathematics for this path-breaking work in Number Theory. This professor of Mathematics at Princeton University discusses various issues with the Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy.

When I asked the students of the MBA class I take about Mathematics the other day, only around 10% of them said they like it. Most of the others detested it. Years ago, I recall another MBA graduate in my office struggling with basic Arithmetic. Maths is an integral part of our everyday life. From waking up to the alarm clock... to train timings... to the price we pay for breakfast... it's all about Mathematics. We work with sheets and charts.... and get a salary at the end of the week or the month.... for which we need to know our numbers right... Yes indeed, That's Mathematics.

 

You liked that song by Tom Lehrer... we'll get him to give us a lesson a little later on. But first we'll do it very easy... ABC is as easy as One Two Three...

Well, the number 'three' reminds me of this song, a song my uncle Denzil used to sing... back in the day, Jake the Peg (Rolf Harris). 

That version did not have my favorite verse of the song.... the one about counting.... on fingers and toes...

Are you ready for the Maths lesson with Tom Lehrer.... on the New Math...

Didn't that song make Maths fun.... 

I put some thought into it... and recalled that I knew to read the time at age 5.... I learnt my tables in regular school.... and in class VI when I opened up a chapter on Bills and Receipts, I instead said Rec-i-pes, and had the entire class burst into laughter.... I was fairly good at Maths through school... though I slipped up when it came to Maths in college.... My Stats teacher in First Year B.Com was quite a terror and predicted based on past experience that more than half the class would end up struggling to Pass. I put my head down to it, and did extremely well. In B=School, I was actually coaching some of my weaker batchmates on Statistics... which made me one of my closest friends in the batch, that I'm still in active contact with. Working in data has been an absolute treat and the current trend of analytics absolutely amazes me.... 

I could go on and on.... which my stories on numbers.... but I'd rather just leave you with this song on advice for life... a sure formula to get the maximum out of life.... 

Acc-en-tu-ate the Positive. 

P.S. I've got another post on this blog on Maths... in fact the very first one.... Check out Music and Math

Music and Math

My Dad played the guitar. I love MUSIC. 

My Mum is a retired Math teacher. I love MATH.

But what do Music and Math have in common?

Probably the first lesson in Math that any of us learnt was in Kindergarten. And it went like this. “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.” If you went to school and studied in Hindi medium after 1988, they probably taught you “Ek Do Teen”, the song from Tezaab, which catapulted Madhuri Dixit to stardom in Bollywood. And if you are a girl, you possibly learnt the steps of the dance as well. Hopefully, the boys did not learn numbers from another popular movie, Ram Lakhan, which released in 1989, which quoted “One Two ka Four, Four Two ka one.”

The continuing experience of learning Math with music came with multiplication tables. I don’t think any of us could learn our tables by heart, without singing through it. “Two Ones are Two, Two Twos are Four… and so on.”

So we have learnt Math with music? Let’s look at the other side.

We probably heard a count of numbers “One, Two, Three, Four” before you started to sing. And for those who hated Math, the question would be, “Why do you bring the numbers to Music class. I thought all we did here was sing.” But then Julie Andrews (in the Sound of Music) and Michael Jackson told us that “Learning Music was as easy as learning ABC – and 123” (Ask a kindergartener how easy that is…they’ll possibly cry). 

All music has is 7 notes that go “Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti… and then repeat all over again and mix them up a bit and you have a song.” Simple, isn’t it. In Hindi it goes “Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Da Ni…” Ever wondered how only the second note is the same. The mix of the notes makes up a Melody or Sur.

And now comes the difficult part, the game of numbers. Music has another important constituent…its called Taal or Rhythm… and it’s out to get you. While most of the time you count to four, some songs require to count to three, and they call it a Waltz. Other songs count to two, and its called a Swing. Where do all these names come from.

If you ever began to learn music theory, the second thing you learn is to count (like you never knew this before). And there are new terms you have to learn – semibreve, minim, crotchet. And that’s just the beginning. Then come the quavers and semiquavers and the demisemiquavers and the hemidemisemiquavers  (Did I just write a nineteen letter word?) -  which is a half, quarter, one- eighth and one-sixteenth respectively (how do you count that?)

Conclusion

Anyway the numbers in the music gives you the rhythm or more simply time. And that’s what makes music dance-able. So if you want to be a good musician, please pay good attention to the Math lessons. And if you’re good at Math, you can be a good musician – if you have strong fingers (for the piano or guitar) or lungs (to blow the wind instruments). Play on...