FROM VIOLIN TO

VIDEOS
(CHAPTER 5)
Presented by:
Group 5
 This chapter deals with a case history of just such a
development, whose most powerful application is
television an invention that arguable has changed our
world more than any other.

It is a story in which the pure and applied aspect

of mathematics combine to yield something far more
powerful and compelling that either could have
produced alone.
It begins at the start of the sixteen century, with the
problem of the vibrating violin string.

It was studied mainly as an exercise in the solution of

differential equations; the work was not aimed at
improving the quality of musical instruments.
 One of the tasks for a mathematical theory is to see
whether this scenario really holds good, and if so, to
work out the details, such as the shape that the string
describes at any instant.

It's a complex problem, because the same string can

vibrate in many different ways, depending upon how it
is plucked.
- Ancient Greeks showed that a vibrating string can produce
many different musical tones.
-Later generations realized that the pitch of the tone is
determined by the frequency of vibration-the rate at which the
string moves to and fro-so the Greek discovery tells us that the
same string can vibrate at many different frequencies.
- Each frequency corresponds to a different configuration of
the moving string, and the same string can take up many
different shapes.
Strings vibrate much too fast for the naked eye to see any one
instantaneous shape, but the Greeks found important evidence
for the idea that a string can vibrate at many different
frequencies.

They showed that the pitch depends on the positions of the

nodes-places along the length of the string which remain
stationary. You can test this on a violin, banjo, or guitar. When
the string is vibrating in its "fundamental“ frequency-that is, with
the lowest possible pitch-only the end points are at rest.
The corresponding vibrations are standing waves,
meaning waves that move up and down but do not travel
along the string. The size of the up-and-down movement
is known as the amplitude of the wave, and this
determines the tone's loudness.
BROOK TAYLOR (1714)-
English mathematician who published the
fundamental vibrational frequency of a violin strings
in terms of its length, tension, and density.

JEAN LE ROND D’ALEMBERT(1746)-

The Frenchman that showed many vibrations of a
violin string are not sinusoidal standing waves. In
fact, he proved that the instantaneous shape of the
wave can be anything you like.
Leonhard Euler (1748)-
In response to d’alemberts work, he worked out
the “wave equations” for a string. Not only did
Euler formulate the wave equation: he solved it.

Daniel Bernoulli-
He also solved the wave equation, but by a
totally different method. According to him, the most
general solution can be represented as a
superposition of infinitely many sinusoidal standing
waves.
 - With the resolution of this controversy, the vibrations of a violin
string ceased to be a mystery, and the mathematicians went hunting
for bigger game.

- A violin string is a curve-a one-dimensional object-but objects

with more dimensions can also vibrate. The most obvious musical
instrument that employs a two-dimensional vibration is the drum.

- So mathematicians turned their attention to drums, starting with

Euler in 1759. Again he derived a wave equation, this one describing
how the displacement of the drum skin in the vertical direction varies
over time.
As their understanding of the wave equation grew, the
mathematicians of the eighteenth century learned to solve the
wave equation for the motion of drums of various shapes.

But now the wave equation began to move out of the musical
domain to establish itself as an absolutely central feature of
mathematical physics.

The same equation began to show up everywhere.And then it

showed up in the theories of electricity and magnetism, and
changed human culture forever.
 WILLIAM BENJIAMN LUIGI ALESSANDRO
GILBERT FRANKLIN GALVANI VOLTA
He describes the He proved that He noticed that
earth as a huge lightning is a form He invented the
magnet and electrical sparks
of electricity by first battery
observed the caused a dead
flying a kite in a
electrical bodies can frog’s leg muscles
thunderstorm
attract and repel to contract.
each other.
Electricity and magnetism have a long, complicated history, far
more complex than that of the wave equation, involving accidental
discoveries and key experiments as well as mathematical and
physical theories.

Throughout much of this early development, electricity and

magnetism were seen as two quite distinct natural phenomena. The
person who set their unification in train was the English physicist
and chemist Michael Faraday.
• Faraday was employed at the Royal Institution in
London, and one of his jobs was to devise a weekly
experiment to entertain its scientifically-minded
members.
• This constant need for new ideas turned Faraday into
one of the greatest experimental physicists of all
time.

• He was especially fascinated by electricity and

magnetism, because he knew that an electric
current could create a magnetic force. He spent ten
years trying to prove that, conversely, a magnet
could produce an electric current, and in 1831 he
succeeded.
 Faraday was no mathematician, but his intellectual successor
James Clerk Maxwell was. Maxwell expressed Faraday's ideas
about lines of force in terms of mathematical equations for
magnetic and electric fields-that is, distributions of magnetic and
electrical charge throughout space.

It is here, in the elegant symbolism of Maxwell's equations, that

humanity made the giant leap from violins to videos: a series of
simple algebraic manipulations extracted the wave equation from
Maxwell's equations-which implied the existence of
electromagnetic waves.
Mathematics reveals the simplicities of nature, and permits us to
generalize from simple examples to the complexities of the real
world. It took many people from many different areas of human
activity to turn a mathematical insight into a useful product. But
the next time you go jogging wearing a Walkman, or switch on
your TV, or watch a videotape, pause for a few seconds to
remember that without mathematicians none of these marvels
would ever have been invented.
 GROUP 5
CHRISTIN GRACE P. BASLAN
JULIENA BONBON
SHARMAINE LIM
REAH AMOR RONDAEL
ANNE LORRAINE T. MIRAFLORES