Department of Mathematics

Tuesday, April 21, 2026

7:00 P.M. – 9:00 P.M.

Location: Gayle Karch Cook Center Grand Hall, Maxwell Hall

Full Story
The Mathematics Department, College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Music Theory, Jacobs School of Music, have announced the 2026 Celebration of Mathematics and Music at Indiana University Bloomington:

Tuesday April 21
7:00 PM
Gayle Karch Cook Center Grand Hall, Maxwell Hall
Indiana University Bloomington
https://tinyurl.com/y4sjdvbz
Visitor Info: https://artsandhumanities.indiana.edu/cook-center/visitor-info.html

The hour-long presentation will feature a mixture of lecture and performances by guest Professor Lillian Pierce, accompanied by IU Jacobs School of Music students.  A reception will follow the event, at the same location.

Lillian Pierce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Pierce is a Professor of Mathematics at Duke University, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a Bonn Research Chair. Her work has received a Sloan Research Fellowship, an AWM-Sadosky Prize, a Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship, a Simons Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.  

Lillian decided to play the violin when she was three years old.  A year later she convinced her parents to find her a teacher, and so she began lessons at the age of four. She started playing as a freelance violinist in the San Diego area when she was eleven. As a teenager, Lillian studied with Michael Tseitlin and attended the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, the Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin Conservatory, and the International Institute of Music at the Bayerische Musikakademie in Marktoberdorf, Germany. While an undergraduate mathematics major at Princeton, Lillian studied with Nancy Wilson, Anna Lim and David Chan. She was co-concertmaster of the Princeton University Orchestra and performed concerti with the Grossmont Symphony in California, the Princeton University Orchestra, the Delaware Valley Philharmonic, and several baroque orchestras on both coasts. After graduating as valedictorian of the Princeton undergraduate class of 2002, Lillian attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, where she was co-concertmaster of the Oxford University Orchestra and the Oxford Pops Orchestra. During her doctoral studies in mathematics at Princeton, Lillian continued to perform, for example staging a reconstruction of a “lost” D minor violin concerto by Bach, and a recital of Rosary Sonatas by Biber.  For the past 17 years, Lillian has employed the Think Method of Professor Harold Hill for her violin studies.

The title of her lecture/performance is Metamorphosis.

Describing the event, Professor Pierce writes, ``In 1864, the mathematician J. J. Sylvester wrote: ‘May not Music be described as the Mathematics of the sense, Mathematics as Music of the reason?...Music the dream, Mathematics the working life.’ This musical lecture will share a bit of both the dream and the working life. In each, the theme is metamorphosis. In mathematics, we will follow the metamorphosis of a simple but powerful idea called superorthogonality, as it weaves through a century of mathematical discoveries. In music, we will experience the Rosary Sonatas of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, which tune and retune the violin in different ways, revealing new sonority and unfamiliar possibilities.”

The musical works performed include selections from Sonaten Über die Mysterien Des Rosenkranzes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosary_Sonatas  by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Ignaz_Franz_Biber .  Further details about the musical program may found in the Jacobs program below, when it becomes available.

[link to draft Jacobs program, in .pdf]

Superothogonality is a generalization of the notion of perpendicularity and is connected to diverse areas in mathematics and applications. The interested reader can find much more here https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10275078 .

Professor Pierce will be accompanied by IU Jacobs School of Music students Evelyn Rohrbach and Macarena Sanchez Ruiz.

This fourth annual event is made possible by: the Celebration of Math and Music Fund, created in 2023 by a gift from alums Leslie and Leon Shivamber ’86, with additional support from alum Frank Graves ’75.

Questions may be directed to Mathematics faculty member Kevin Pilgrim ’85 pilgrim@iu.edu

Image below: Detail of a renowned Amati Viola, from which the modern shape of the instrument derives.