College Girl Sings Math

Here's an article that I wrote for my mag. I really find her song called "Horizontal Asymptote" cute. I can relate to it.

"Getting close to you. . .arbitrarily close to you, but no matter how close I go, (I think-this is me!) I'll never get to touch you, my horizontal asymptote."

DONNA requesting on the radio: I dedicate the song Horizontal Asymptote to my department-to-be. Will I ever get to touch you? Or should I just give you up and leave?

Click the link for the mp3 of Horizontal Asymptote.

The popular songs of our times are mostly about life experiences and relationship between people. Melodies at different genres sound good, as well as the lyrics of the songs which use simple languages and figures of speech—not as technical as those we learn in math or in science. But there’s one girl from the University of California-Berkeley, Nicole Campbell, who writes and sings songs using mathematical topics and terms, like angles and lines.

Nicole performed on the CAL Day celebration of her university last April, where she shared the beauty of music, mathematics, and science through her songs.

For the 20-year-old Biology major, there are a lot of things in life that can be described by math and science metaphors—concepts in Calculus and Physics to name a few. On the other hand, the best way to learn these subjects is to relate the topics to touchable things that people see everyday.

The talented Nicole started to write songs about math and science in her senior year in high school. She always asked her teachers to let her write songs about their class topic answering the homework itself. She is looking forward to becoming a teacher soon, and now that many and many are appreciating her music, Nicole hopes to write for every thing she teaches.

For those who are not familiar with horizontal asymptote:

A graph with a horizontal asymptote looks like this: The x-axis or the line y = 0 is the horizontal asymptote of the given curve.