Matt Salomone, Kalman Nanes, Scott Bailey, Clark Alexander, and Mike Johnson (not present).
About the performance:
“Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)” is, as its name suggests, the song of a trivial element’s love for their long-lost nontrivial. At the time of the song’s writing in 2004, the Aschbacher-Smith classification theorem for quasithin groups had just been published, completing the decades-long project of classifying all finite simple groups, and this momentous accomplishment inspired the mathematical content of this piece. The thickly jargonned puns found in every lyrical line of the song touch many areas of higher mathematics, however, and many Klein Four fans have remarked that along their educational journey they could gauge the breadth of their knowledge by the number of new puns and references they discovered each time they re-listened. The lesson of Klein Four’s music, and the source of its timeless appeal particularly among students, is that mathematics always tells a human story — one in which everyone can have voice.
Bio:
Twenty years ago, in a time when such boredom was still possible, four bored graduate students on a road trip together each discovered that the others were unashamed of their singing voices. Soon after, at the Northwestern University math department’s annual holiday talent show, the a cappella anthem “Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)” was born. It would become a surprise viral sensation in the pre-social-media era, and part of the soundtrack of math students’ educational lives worldwide. The Klein Four went on to record their debut album “Musical Fruitcake” in an Evanston apartment, a mixture of original and parody compositions each writing human stories in the vocabulary of advanced mathematics. Today the group’s elements are scattered around the country in various academic and industry positions. Today’s is their first performance together since 2007.
Nancy Scherich 