In 2018 Harvard held a week-long celebration for Barry Mazur’s 80th birthday. In keeping with Mazur’s wide-ranging interests, and with the title — Mathematics Is a Long Conversation — the middle day was devoted to panel discussions on topics accessible to the general public. That day’s program concluded with a public lecture by Manjul Bhargava entitled Poetry, Drumming, and Mathematics. Bhargava explained how mathematical principles were discovered in India, as far back as the 3rd century B.C., in connection with poetic meter and rhythms in drumming.
To say more would be to deprive the viewer of the pleasure of discovering these connections at the pace at which Bhargava chose to reveal them. This pleasure can now freely be enjoyed at the IHES YouTube site, which has just uploaded Oliver Ralfe’s video of Bhargava’s talk.
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