Number songs

[only_human]

A song about the world’s biggest prime number
DURATION: 01:57 (requires flash)
To download a copy of the song, click on the free track link below, make a donation of 0.00 or more and you then receive an emailed link to start a download.

Originally Posted by only_human

FREE TRACK - Mersenne 48
by Helen Arney

[only_human]

Danica McKellar has charmed us from her acting days to contemporary efforts to make mathematics fun and approachable. Wikipedia:Danica McKellar->Mathematics

McKellar studied mathematics at UCLA, graduating summa cum laude in 1998.

As an undergraduate, she coauthored a scientific paper with Professor Lincoln Chayes and fellow student Brandy Winn entitled "Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models on." Their results are termed the 'Chayes–McKellar–Winn theorem'.

Referring to the mathematical abilities of his student coauthors, Chayes was quoted in The New York Times as saying, "I thought that the two were really, really first-rate." McKellar's Erdős number is four. She is one of the few people with an Erdős–Bacon number, which combines an Erdős number with a Bacon Number (as in the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon) since she also has a Bacon number of 2, making her Erdos-Bacon number a 6.

Today, in this first episode of the weekly series Math Bites with Danica McKellar, she sings a lot of digits of PI to The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies. This looks like it needs flash also. I have advanced 3:14 into this video to pick up the song on the URL link. She must have placed it at that index deliberately.

Click URL link to watch starting at 3:14
The Pi Episode: Math Bites with Danica McKellar

Or you can drag the slidebar to 3:14 below

Here is the cast displayed on YouTube after clicking show more:

Cast:
Danica McKellar - Host
Matt Mira - Blueberry pie lover
Felicia Day - Lemon Meringue pie lover
Dustin Milligan & Amanda Crew -- Smart Couple
Lisa Carnahan - Hungry Woman
Brian Cohen - Clown
Ross Beely - Shirtless Dude with Fan
Meghan Hooper White - Beautiful Singer
Mahaila McKellar - Woman eating pie
Matt Kawcynzski - Guy eating pie
Karen Prell & John Tartaglia - Puppeteers

Dance of Sugar Pi Fairy video:
Danica McKellar - Sugar Pi Fairy, Scientist, Angel, Devil
Chris Hardwick, Jonah Ray, Matt Mira - Men in tutus
Felicia Day - Pi expert
Jonathan Bennett, Jim O'Heir, Simon Pegg, Chris Hardwick - Singing flower heads
Special thanks to Marat Daukayev School of Ballet, Los Angeles, California
Dancers: Olivia Brothers, Emma Daukayev, Priscilla Duggan, Camden Foster, Judith No, Alexandra Wood, Stella Zuniga

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by only_human

[URL="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01ns0wj"]A song about the world’s biggest prime number
<snip>.

aleph_null bottles of beer on the wall,
aleph_null bottles of beer,
you take one down,
you pass it around,
aleph_null bottles of beer on the wall.

[LaurV]

well, technically she is wrong, if you divide pumpkin circumference to the pumpkin diameter, you only get pie, and not pumpkin pie, because the pumpkins simplify each other from the numerator and denominator....

[only_human]

Originally Posted by LaurV

well, technically she is wrong, if you divide pumpkin circumference to the pumpkin diameter, you only get pie, and not pumpkin pie, because the pumpkins simplify each other from the numerator and denominator....

True. Worthy of the dumb jokes thread though.

Here is another one floating around the void web: OMG, OMG, OMG, 3.14 In a Mirror Spells...
No need to click: (PIE). This is a little like those old calculator words like 710 77345 spelling "Shell Oil" (rotated Pi radians).

[only_human]

Originally Posted by R.D. Silverman

aleph_null bottles of beer on the wall,
aleph_null bottles of beer,
you take one down,
you pass it around,
aleph_null bottles of beer on the wall.

For the gratuitously vicarious:
Infinity bottles of beer (YouTube.com)


Wikipedia: 99 Bottles of Beer->Mathematically inspired variants

Donald Byrd has collected dozens of variants inspired by mathematical concepts and written by himself and others. (A subset of his collection has been published.) Byrd argues the collection has pedagogic as well as amusement value. Among his variants are:

• "Infinite bottles of beer on the wall". If one bottle is taken down, there are still infinite bottles of beer on the wall (thus creating an unending sequence much like "The Song That Never Ends").
  
• "Aleph-Null bottles of beer on the wall". Aleph-Null is the size of the set of all natural numbers, and is the smallest infinity and the only countable one.
  
• "Uncountable bottles of beer on the wall". An uncountably infinite set is larger than a countable one; therefore, if only a countable infinity of bottles fall, an uncountable number remains.

Other versions in Byrd's collection involve concepts including geometric progressions, differentials, Euler's identity, complex numbers, summation notation, the Cantor set, the Fibonacci series, and the Continuum Hypothesis, among others.

On an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, on a way to the mathematics competition Malcolm's classmates – the Krelboynes – sing a variation of this song stating "the square root of (number of) bottles of beer". Malcolm states to the camera that they are only at the nineties.

References in science

The computer scientist Donald Knuth proved that the song has complexity O(log N) in his in-joke-article "The Complexity of Songs".

Computer programs exist to output the lyrics to the song. This is analogous to "Hello World" programs, with the addition of loops. As with "Hello World", this can be a practice exercise for those studying computer programming, and a demonstration of the differences between programming languages.

Donald Byrd's full collection of variants: (PDF)

Infinite Bottles of Beer
Mathematical Concepts with Epsilon Pain
Or: A cantorial approach to Cantorian arithmetic and other
mathematical melodies

But then I thought, why stop with countable infinities? So another version occurred to me, and another of a somewhat different kind. I started writing them down, adding contributions from friends I occasionally received. Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that these “songs” actually carry some pedagogical value in that they make relatively painless demonstrations of mathematical concepts that people often find hard to understand. The full collection appears below

[only_human]

A song about the Twin Prime Conjecture from Nova's ScienceNow, uploaded in 2008 to YouTube that mentions Daniel Goldston regarding advances in characterizing prime pairs.
NOVA scienceNOW | Twin Prime Conjecture | PBS

[Puzzle-Peter]

A song about the golden ratio:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBgQPSUTWVM

[only_human]

Originally Posted by Puzzle-Peter

A song about the golden ratio:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBgQPSUTWVM

Thanks.

Here's another. This one on e is cool because it has good equation displays and is fast paced:

2.71828183: The number e song