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“Find,
find the value of pi -- starts 3 point 1 4 1 5 9.
A good ol’ fraction you may hope to divine, but the
decimal never dies ....”
-- from Larry Lesser’s “American Pi”
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photo © 1999 Lauren Davis Lesser performs during the
keynote presentation for a district-wide in-service for CONTACT INFO: |
ABOUT
THE MATHEMUSICIAN: To
support his mission in increasing awareness and motivation in
mathematics/statistics, Professor Lesser has tapped and merges two of his
great loves – math and music. An award-winning
songwriter (most recently, 2nd-place in the fall 2012 El Paso
Songwriting Contest and 2 of the top 3 places in the 2013 CAUSE A-mu-sing
national song contest), his thoughtful and entertaining math songs have
attracted international media coverage (including Australia’s
largest newspaper and newstalk radio interviews
from El Paso to Jamaica!) and led to plenary presentations for audiences
ranging from mathematics teachers (e.g., an SRO audience of 800+ at the
opening plenary session of the 2009 National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics regional conference in Nashville) to
mathematicians (e.g., the opening banquet at the 2008 national summer meeting
of the Mathematical Association of America) to statisticians (e.g., the
banquet at the 2013 United States Conference on Teaching Statistics). Since 2011, Lesser has been the featured
guest (and lyricist) on six episodes of a children’s PBS-TV show, including
an
episode on math and music and was also featured on the Feb. 1, 2013
KFOX-TV evening news for teaching a lesson to local 7th and 8th
graders on the mathematics of stringed instruments. Lesser has
internationally published some 50 math/stat
lyrics as well as the first juried comprehensive articles on using songs
in mathematics/statistics class. As the Mathemusician
(some say “the Weird Al Yankovic of
mathematics/statistics education”), Lesser incorporates guitar in his
interactive classes and keynotes, facilitating explorations and performing
raps and parodies, creatively adapting popular lyrics towards content such as
infinity, pi, problem solving, graphing functions, as well as even more
worldly applications such as understanding the lottery! for more
detail about his math-and-music activity, click here ; for a
brief overall bio, see this next paragraph:
LESSER’S OVERALL “PROFESSOR BIO”: see paragraph on http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/lesser/
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Resources
& Bibliography | Lyrics
of Greatest LESSER hits | Cool Math &
Music Quotes |
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