Glasgow, United Kingdom

Mathematics / Music

Integrated Master's degree
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: mathematics and statistics
Qualification: MA
Kind of studies: full-time studies, part-time studies
Master of Arts (MA)
University website: www.gla.ac.uk
Mathematics
Mathematics (from Greek μάθημα máthēma, "knowledge, study, learning") is the study of such topics as quantity, structure, space, and change. It has no generally accepted definition.
Music
Music is an art form and cultural activity whose medium is sound organized in time. The common elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics (loudness and softness), and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture (which are sometimes termed the "color" of a musical sound). Different styles or types of music may emphasize, de-emphasize or omit some of these elements. Music is performed with a vast range of instruments and vocal techniques ranging from singing to rapping; there are solely instrumental pieces, solely vocal pieces (such as songs without instrumental accompaniment) and pieces that combine singing and instruments. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike; "art of the Muses"). See glossary of musical terminology.
Mathematics
Mathematical development in England was at a low ebb in the early decades of the nineteenth century, with Cambridge stagnating in the shadow of Newton, who had produced his mathematics nearly a century and a half earlier. This dead hand of tradition, which stifled much initiative and originality, was in sharp contrast to the situation in France.
D. Mary Cannell, "George Green Mathematician and Physicist 1793-1841: The background to his life and work" p. xxviii (second edition, 2001).
Music
Where music dwells
Lingering, and wandering on as loth to die:
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality.
William Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Part III. 63. Inside of King's Chapel, Cambridge.
Mathematics
Who has studied the works of such men as Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, Riemann, Sophus Lie, and Weierstrass, can doubt that a great mathematician is a great artist? The faculties possessed by such men, varying greatly in kind and degree with the individual, are analogous with those requisite for constructive art. Not every mathematician possesses in a specially high degree that critical faculty which finds its employment in the perfection of form, in conformity with the ideal of logical completeness; but every great mathematician possesses the rarer faculty of constructive imagination.
E. W. Hobson, Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science (1910) Nature Vol. 84 p. 290 as quoted by Robert Édouard Moritz, Memorabilia Mathematica; Or, The Philomath's Quotation-book (1914) p. 184.
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