Stephanie Chou - Continuum Hypothesis

CONTINUUM HYPOTHESIS
Composed Fall 2020
More info: http://www.stephaniechoumusic.com/con...

Stephanie Chou - voice
Jason Yeager - piano

Recorded during Quarantine
Piano recorded Dec 23, 2020
Vocal recorded Jan 26, 2021 at Spin Studios, LIC
Mixed by Roy Hendrickson

It’s not often that someone asks me to write a math‐related song, so when Mark Weiss of Earthwise Productions/Lions With Wings (https://www.earthwiseproductions.live) contacted me about composing a musical response to the Continuum Hypothesis, I was thrilled. Math has been an ongoing part of my life, and I sometimes look for ways to combine math with my music. My album Prime Knot was an instrumental take on this; Asymptote is a song that uses a math metaphor as the lyrics. Sometimes I write lyric math ‘parodies’ of famous songs. But this is the first song I’ve written about such a theoretical topic.

CH: There is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and the real numbers. (More reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continu...)
The widely-­-accepted view on CH is that its truth is independent of standard set theory, and that its truth is undecidable. So it can’t be proven true or false, using standard set theory. Or, it can be true or not true, depending on how you look at it. That has different implications for what you want to do. AND, we don’t know whether an infinite set that’s between the size of the reals and integers exists –you can’t prove that it exists, but you also can’t prove it doesn’t exist. So we can’t know. To most people, that settles the question; it’s undecidable, there is no answer. That’s out there.

People often think that math is black‐and‐white, yes‐or‐no, and that things are clear‐cut, orderly, and provable. They also often think of math as being absolute, and don’t realize that mathematicians are exploring new ideas and trying things out all the time, that there are new discoveries being made. Sometimes there are partially­‐answered questions or results that are not yet conclusive, which may take generations of mathematicians to advance. Learning about CH took me on a journey of also looking at the lives of the mathematicians who advanced these theories, their thought processes, and the implications of their work in set theory, math, and beyond.

At its highest levels, advanced mathematics and logic requires a lot of creativity –just like in art.

This song is my response to all of these ideas. It is dedicated to Paul Cohen, 1934‐2007, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.
Longer composer's note: http://www.stephaniechoumusic.com/con...


Photo by Emra Islek
Graphic Design by Christina Wen
Video edited by Mike Suchmann
http://www.stephaniechoumusic.com​​


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