The Mathematics Hour is a colloquium series on any and all topics of interest in mathematics and computer science. The speakers include both the faculty and the students in the department, and the talks are open to anyone interested. Please contact Russell Rainville (russellr@maine.edu) if you have a talk you would like to present.
Next Mathematics Hour Talk:
Complexity of d-note Chords Within a c-note Chromatic Universe
Joshua Case
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
3:45 pm in Preble 333
Burnside’s lemma can be used to compute the number of orbits when a group acts on a set. Musically, this is equivalent to counting the number of set classes of d-note collections within a chromatic universe of size c. This calculation can be very time consuming. However, by allowing the dihedral group of order 2d to act on the set of scale vectors of d-note collections (within a c-note chromatic universe), the counting process may become drastically easier. Given c and d, the number of set-classes can be considered a form of complexity. How does the complexity change as we adjust the variable c and d, and what does it mean musically? This talk will serve as a progress report of the current research.
Future Mathematics Hour Talks:
To be announced…