Lots of people use pen and paper to do math. Come learn to do it with just paper - add, divide, multiply, and even solve quadratic equations for x, and hint towards the context of Galois theory and fields.

In this class, we will ask: "Who creates music?" Answers to this question have evolved as music has become increasingly interactive and the burden of interpretation has moved between musicians, composers, and audiences. We will particularly explore We will dive into techniques for enhancing and explaining music by means of synchronized video. We will trace a winding history — through Solesmes Abbey, Fischinger’s “Motion Paintings”, the Fantasia films, and MilkDrop — to arrive at and analyze Stephen Malinowski’s work. Along the way, we will create our own animation of music (probably a short except of Bach or Mendelssohn) according to our tastes as a classroom.

This course will ask the question, "why do we think that the sun will rise tomorrow?". After all, we've only seen the sun rise finitely many times. Why **do** we expect the pattern that "the sun rises each day" to continue? Why **don't** we expect the pattern that "the sun rises on and only on days when the human population is less than 8 billion" to continue? More generally, as humans and scientists, we find patterns that match our meager observations, then we guess that those patterns will continue to hold. When we interpret the word "pattern" with sufficient generality, there are lots of mutually inconsistent patterns that explain any given data. Addressing this ambiguity, we typically restrict to small classes of "simple patterns". This preference for simplicity is called Occam's Razor. We'll investigate Occam's Razor from a statistical point of view. Topics we'll discuss may include: VC dimension, information-theoretic bounds, Dudley chaining, concentration inequalities.

Who creates music? The composer? The musician? The audience? It used to be composers and musicians who crafted most of our musical experiences. In order for composers to communicate with musicians, they invented sheet music notation. Now, as creators draw music in more and more complicated and interesting was, the notation itself --- visually engaging and synchronized with sound --- is itself becoming a major part of musical creativity. I like to say that an animation is a score for listeners and an animator is a conductor for the audience. We will look at and listen to several musical animations in this class, and even create our own animation of a music clip!

Why do we remember the past but not the future? Why are rubber bands so stretchy? Is the universe right-handed or left-handed, and what does this even mean!? We know absolute zero is unattainable --- but can we reach $$\texttt{negative}$$ Kelvin?! And can your atoms ever escape from a black hole? Our common theme will be IRREVERSIBILITY in physics --- that is, processes that go forward more than they go backward. Some of this fast-paced survey of ALL OF TIME will be based on Richard Feynman's freely available lecture "The Distinction between Past and Future". I invite you to check it out beforehand!

Who creates music? The composer? The musician? The audience? The creative burden of bridging between abstract emotion and concrete sensation has oscillated drastically among those roles, from taciturn Bach to picky Chopin, from improvisatory Bill Evans to contrarian John Cage. In such multi-party creation, communication is key, hence the development of elaborate scoring notations and of diverse performance technologies. Now, modern tools invite a new shift toward a fourth creative role: that of a visual animator. An animation is a score for listeners, a new channel through which parties may communicate musical intention. Thus, parts critic, guide, and poet, an animator conducts not the musicians but the audience. In this class, we will dive into techniques for enhancing and explaining music by means of synchronized video. We will trace a winding history --- through Solesmes Abbey, Fischinger's "Motion Paintings", the Fantasia films, and MilkDrop --- to arrive at and analyze Stephen Malinowski's YouTube work. In a final and especially interactive session, we will create our own animation of music according to our tastes as a classroom.