Photo Credit: Mike Colletta

Robert Schneider, featured in The Elephant 6 Recording Co. (Friday, 7:30 p.m.), is an indie-pop musician, composer of instrumental and experimental music, recording studio producer/engineer, and co-founder of the Elephant 6 Recording Co., a collective of musicians and artists.  He is also an assistant professor of mathematics here at Michigan Tech. As a musician, he invented a “non-Pythagorean” musical scale based on logarithms, and used it to compose music. He also invented a mind-controlled synthesizer, and used it to compose music. In collaboration with experimental composer Michael G. Maxwell on the Visual and Performing Arts faculty, he sponsors the MTU Mathematics and Music Lab (MML).  The goals of the MML are to produce futuristic works of music and installation art, explore music theory using mathematics, and invent new audio hardware and software. His research interests lie primarily in number theory and combinatorics, in particular the theory of partitions, special functions in the orbit of modular forms (q-series mock theta functions, quantum modular forms), and analytic number theory (prime distribution, Riemann zeta function, arithmetic functions, arithmetic density).