Senior Holden Mui appreciates the small print in arithmetic and music. A well-written orchestral piece and a well-designed aggressive math downside each require a sure aptitude and a well-tuned sense of tips on how to preserve an viewers’s curiosity.
“Folks need recent, new, non-recycled approaches to math and music,” he says. Mui sees his position as a information of types, somebody who can take his concepts for a musical composition or a math downside and share them with audiences in an interesting means. His concepts should make the transition from his thoughts to the web page in as exact a means as doable. Particulars matter.
A double main in math and music from Lisle, Illinois, Mui believes it’s essential to ask folks right into a inventive course of that enables a sort of dialog to happen between a bit of music he writes and his viewers, for instance. Or a math downside and the individuals who attempt to clear up it. “A part of math’s enchantment is its capacity to disclose deep truths that could be hidden in easy statements,” he argues, “whereas up to date classical music needs to be out there for enjoyment by as many individuals as doable.”
Mui’s first expertise at MIT was as a highschool pupil in 2017. He visited as a member of a highschool math competitors staff attending an occasion hosted and staged by MIT and Harvard College college students. The next 12 months, Mui met different college students at math camps and commenced considering significantly about what was subsequent.
“I selected math as a serious as a result of it’s been a ardour of mine since highschool. My curiosity grew via competitions and continued to develop it via analysis,” he says. “I selected MIT as a result of it boasts one in every of essentially the most rigorous and achieved arithmetic departments within the nation.”
Mui can also be a math downside author for the Harvard-MIT Math Match (HMMT) and performs with Ribotones, a membership that travels to locations like retirement houses or public areas on the Institute’s campus to play music free of charge.
Mui research piano with Timothy McFarland, an artist affiliate at MIT, via the MIT Emerson/Harris Fellowship Program, and beforehand studied with Kate Nir and Matthew Hagle of the Music Institute of Chicago. He began piano on the age of 5 and cites French composer Maurice Ravel as one in every of his main musical influences.
As a music pupil at MIT, Mui is concerned in piano efficiency, chamber music, collaborative piano, the MIT Symphony Orchestra as a violist, conducting, and composition.
He enjoys the unimaginable selection out there inside MIT’s music program. “It provides all the pieces from digital music to world music research,” he notes, “and has broadened my understanding and appreciation of music’s range.”
Collaborating to create
All through his tutorial profession, Mui discovered himself amongst like-minded college students like former Yale College undergraduate Andrew Wu. Collectively, Mui and Wu received an Emergent Ventures grant. On this collaboration, Mui wrote the music Wu would play. Wu described his expertise with one in every of Mui’s compositions, “Poetry,” as “demanding critical focus and continued re-readings,” yielding nuances even after repeated listens.
One other of Mui’s compositions, “Landscapes,” was carried out by MIT’s Symphony Orchestra in October 2024 and supplied audiences alternatives to have interaction with the concepts he explores in his music.
One of many challenges Mui found early is that tutorial composers generally create music audiences may battle to grasp. “Folks typically say that music is a common language, however one of the crucial useful insights I’ve gained at MIT is that music isn’t as universally skilled as one may assume,” he says. “There are notable variations, for instance, between Western music and world music.”
This, Mui says, broadened his perspective on tips on how to method music and inspired him to contemplate his viewers extra carefully when composing. He treats music as a possibility to ask folks into how he thinks.
Artistic concepts, accessible outcomes
Mui understands the worth of sharing his abilities and concepts with others, crediting the MIT Worldwide Science and Know-how Initiatives (MISTI) program with providing a number of alternatives for journey and educating. “I’ve been on three MISTI journeys throughout IAP [Independent Activities Period] to show arithmetic,” he says.
Mui says it’s essential to be versatile, dynamic, and adaptable in preparation for a satisfying skilled life. Music and math each demand the event of the sorts of soppy abilities that may assist him succeed as a musician, composer, and mathematician.
“Creating math issues is surprisingly just like writing music,” he argues. “In each circumstances, the work must be complicated sufficient to be attention-grabbing with out changing into unapproachable.” For Mui, designing unique math issues is “like making an attempt to jot down down an unique melody.”
“To write down math issues, you must have seen quite a lot of math issues earlier than. To write down music, you must know the literature — Bach, Beethoven, Ravel, Ligeti — as various a bunch of personalities as doable.”
A future within the notes and numbers
Mui factors to the skilled and private virtues of exploring totally different fields. “It permits me to construct a extra various community of individuals with distinctive views,” he says. “Professionally, having a variety of experiences and viewpoints to attract on is invaluable; the broader my information and community, the extra insights I can achieve to succeed.”
After graduating, Mui plans to pursue doctoral research in arithmetic following the completion of a cryptography internship. “The connections I’ve made at MIT, and can proceed to make, are useful as a result of they’ll be helpful whatever the profession I select,” he says. He desires to proceed researching math he finds difficult and rewarding. As along with his music, he desires to strike a stability between emotion and innovation.
“I believe it’s essential to not pull all of 1’s eggs in a single basket,” he says. “One essential determine that involves thoughts is Isaac Newton, who cut up his time amongst three fields: physics, alchemy, and theology.” Mui’s path ahead will inevitably embody music and math. Whether or not crafting compositions or designing math issues, Mui seeks to ask others right into a world the place notes and numbers converge to create that means, encourage connection, and remodel understanding.
