Alex 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.
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