Sharjah: Meet professor who teaches maths through music
Both subjects are connected by beauty, abstraction and universality, he says
Sharjah: Thinking out of the box, we have learnt over the ages, can literally work wonders.
A visiting Moroccan professor, who knows this too well, will tell you there’s no limit when it comes to such thinking.
Speaking at the 15th Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival (SCRF) on Thursday, he wowed his audiences with his offbeat take on how he teaches maths through music.
“As a teacher of mathematics, I include music whenever an opportunity arises,” said Dr Afrazin who teaches maths at Morocco’s University Sultan Moulay Slimane.
“In engineering, I often try using the musical scale to teach seemingly complex topics like probability. I also perceive music as a good medium to understand certain aspects of statistics even. Both maths and music are connected by beauty, abstraction and universality. I may not speak your language but we both will understand the language of music as well as mathematics. Both are universal, everyone understands.”
The session in which he was participating was also attended by Malaysian children’s author Ying Ying Ng.
“Music extends beyond maths as it enhances emotional qualities and when you add dynamics, performances. Music has a taste, style and colour of its own. Music, for me, can represent maths in arts,” said Ying Ying Ng, executive director of Pocostudio, a Kuala Lumpur-based music education book publisher and an author of children’s books.
“In teaching music, we engage in a lot of activities and that’s because we want children to understand mathematics as well through music. We want them to feel it through the activities and not just [through writing] on paper. Both music and maths share patterns and symmetries [we often don’t see],” she said.
The duo went on to explore the similarities and differences between the two disciplines, and how they intersect in terms of structure, patterns and creative expression.
The session was moderated by Mania Suwaid on the festival’s cultural forum.
The 12-day SCRF, themed ‘Once Upon a Hero’, is featuring over 1,500 cultural, creative and edutainment activities with the participation of 186 publishers from 20 countries.