Get Herald RSSAlex Kontorovich's family has been steeped in math for generations. But he is the only member of his family who studied number theory and also became a musician.
"That was sort of an accident," he said.
Kontorovich, who is 27 and an assistant professor of mathematics, arrived at Brown in September after completing undergraduate work at Princeton University and receiving a Ph.D. from Columbia University. As he said a friend of his pointed out, the Bears were really the only choice after the Lions and Tigers.
Kontorovich is currently doing research in number theory, a branch of mathematics concerned largely with the study of prime numbers - the building blocks of numbers, he said.
There is a vast catalog of unanswered questions in number theory, he explained, some posed millennia ago by the Greeks.
"Most of these problems are hopeless," Kontorovich said. "If these problems have been around for 2,000 years, what says I'm going to be able to completely solve it?" But, he added, there are always partial answers to be found.
A classic example of a number theory problem is the Goldbach conjecture - the assertion that any even number greater than two can be represented as the sum of just two primes. It is still unproven.
Number theory does have practical applications, Kontorovich said, such as in cryptography, which keeps your credit card number safe when you use it online. But Kontorovich is more interested in number theory as an intellectual pursuit.
"When I solve a theorem, I see something with my eyes that humankind has never seen before," Kontorovich said.
Another draw to mathematics was the pure logic of it, he said. "I don't have to go digging for dinosaurs anywhere."
But Kontorovich doesn't spend all his time poring over papers in his office, either. He splits his week between Providence and New York, where he is very much involved in the music scene.
He plays clarinet and saxophone in a number of improvisational jazz, klezmer and other groups. He has an album, "Deep Forest," due out Oct. 5 from Chamsa Records. Kontorovich composed all the music on the disc, with songs like "Transit Strike Blues" and "New Orleans Funeral March" clearly drawn from current events, and others, such as "Kandels Burning," updates of old tunes.
Originally written as a street march, "New Orleans Funeral March" took on a life of its own at a rehearsal and was renamed after Hurricane Katrina. It was "like a hurricane had happened in the music," Kontorovich said.
Kontorovich said he found music in "sort of an accident" when, after seeing a jazz concert in eighth grade, he walked out of the concert air-playing the saxophone. His parents soon got him a horn and lessons.
Though he doesn't mention it in class, Kontorovich's musical half is known to his students, said Danny Klotz '11. Kontorovich is teaching MATH 0180: "Intermediate Calculus" this semester.
Reviews of "Deep Minor" so far are positive, with the Jewish Week calling Kontorovich "an imaginative, thoughtful improviser," and Midwest Record writing that "Deep Minor" is "tasty stuff the open-eared will dig."
Kontorovich defined his preferred genre as anything involving improvisation. His other musical projects have included a series of concerts in Weimar, Germany, with six other jazz musicians from three continents, and some collaboration with King Django, which put him in ska and reggae territory.
Kontorovich spends much more time on tour than in the studio, he said, preferring to see new faces, new cities and go "exploring."
But of course, three days a week he's back in Providence. His post-doctoral teaching gig will end after three years, after which he plans to look for a permanent position in the New York area, Kontorovich said. Until then, he'll be teaching and working on number theory - or something else.
"Just like in music," he said, "you get bored if you're doing the same thing for too long."
