'Calculus: The Musical' lands at UA for one performance

OK, this one has got us scratching our heads:

“Calculus: The Musical.”

Yup, a musical based on math. You can find it on the Crowder Hall stage Friday, Jan. 27

Yeah, yeah, we know what the philosopher Pythagoras said: “There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”

But some of us are math dunces. Though we may not have been if we had a teacher like Marc Gutman, who came up with the concept of “Calculus: The Musical” in 2006.

At the time, Gutman taught the subject in a Minneapolis high school, where some students had trouble remembering a calculus formula. So he put it to the tune of the song “Can Can” and the formula stuck with the students.

A light bulb went off over Gutman’s head. He set as many formulas as he could to music. And “Calculus: The Musical” was born.

Local math nerd Bruce Bayly — he teaches the subject at the UA, is director of the Arizona Math Road Show and drives The Math Bus — discovered the musical and thought it might be a way to spread the joy that he finds in numbers. It’s his energy that is bringing it to Crowder.

Sadie Bowman is one of the two members of the cast (the other is University of Arizona graduate Ricky Coates) and has been with the show since Gutman first developed it. She answered some questions by email for us:

Not just numbers; it’s comedy, too: “When you can find playful elements in a complex concept, it really helps open up space to relax about it and strip away the intimidation factor, and that allows so much more space for understanding — or at least appreciation. ... There are some jokes that will land in different places for you depending on your familiarity with the material. All three of us in the company sort of love puns (sorry not sorry), so there’s quite a bit of double entendre that is funny in different ways depending on how it hits you.”

Making it make sense: “You’ll find that most of the lyrics really are quite densely packed. In a lot of cases they are literally formulas, verbatim, set to music and enhanced with some fun rhymes and wordplay. ...They began as tools to aid memorization, so in that sense their composition developed a little differently than most other parody songs. If you recognize a song in the show, you’ll bring your own connotations to the music and hopefully chuckle at the new application. If you’re actively a student of calculus, however, they have the added layer of being useful notes that you can apply directly to your studies.”

Adding it up: “You won’t leave the show suddenly knowing how to solve equations or find your own derivatives, but we hope you’ll have a better sense of what calculus is and maybe be less afraid to learn more.

“If you already know and love calculus, we hope you will revel in the tributes and leave even more excited, feeling you are in good company with people who appreciate math and like to have fun with it.”