Lecturer:
Ivana Slamić
One of the aims of science is to discover, understand and explain truths about the world around us and mathematics is often called the language of nature. Using mathematics, we can describe various types of real-world phenomena, both of deterministic and random nature. On the other hand, the essence of music seems to be too profound to be described solely by mathematical laws. However, we can first observe that not every sound can be considered music – a part of its beauty lies in patterns, harmonies – which can often be described using mathematics. Moreover, its beauty lies in diversity of tones produced by different instruments and variety of interpretations. Despite it is, of course, possible to create, perform or just enjoy music without being aware of the mathematics in its background, it is fascinating to realize that one can understand this diversity through diversity of functions and functions can be used to generate tones. The mathematical branch which can be used to describe formally this relation is called the harmonic analysis. In this talk, through the story about discovering mathematics in music, we describe two basic ideas – observing mathematical patterns in music and tones and the representation of tones in terms of the simple ones, based on the mathematical idea of approximation.
Biography:
Ivana Slamić is an assistant professor at the University of Rijeka, Department of Mathematics. She was born in Rijeka in 1985 where she finished primary school and gymnasium, as well as the primary and secondary music school. She studied Mathematics at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Science, Department of Mathematics, where she gratuated in 2008 and received her PhD in 2013. She has been working at the Department of Mathematics in Rijeka since 2008. Her research interests include harmonic analysis and wavelet theory.
