Jon Gallant ([log in to unmask]) wrote:

>I think we will find ourselves on firmer ground if we take music as A
>BRANCH of mathematics: abstracted from the symbolic system of quantity
>relationships which, we find, has deep roots in the real world.

Well, I think many pure mathematicians would disagree with your descripton
of mathematics as being founded in the real world. Many branches of
mathematics have been invented/discovered decades before any real world
application was discovered - two examples being group theory, an 18th-19th
century formalism, which eventually found application in X-ray crytallography
in the 1960s IIRC; and number theory - the specialism of G.H.Hardy at
Cambridge, who in his autobiography "A Mathematician's Apology" proudly
prfesses that nothing he knows professionally could be of conceivable
use to anyone - which is now the heart of cryptography and cryptanalysis.

Moreover, where in music, are the equivalents of theorems and proofs?

There is undoubtedly a relationship, as there is with other fields:
when I was reading Maths at Cambridge I soon found out that my fellow
mathematicians mostly enjoyed at least two of Music, Bridge and Chess
outside of their field.

Deryk Barker
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