Mathematics

Besides his musical studies, Laurent Beeckmans studied mathematics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the University of East Anglia graduating in 1989 and obtaining his PhD Thesis in 1996. He now teaches mathematics, statistics and logic of programming at the Brussels' High School for Computer Sciences.

During his studies, he specialized into the fascinating field of Number Theory giving a dissertation on Egyptians fractions. His PhD Thesis investigated three further areas of Number Theory: Pell's equations, sums of consecutive squares and a well known conjecture by Erdös on arithmetic progressions.

Laurent Beeckmans likes to investigate the links between music and mathematics on a structural and logical level. The combinatoric organisation of music that is found for instance in minimalistic music is of great importance in his music. On the other hand, he is musch more reticent to apply methodic manners of writing such as dodecaphonic or serial music.

It is thus only occasionally that he conceives musical works as the result of strict mathematical rules. There are some exception in his output, for instance the Fibonacci Loops whose melodic patterns are drawn from modular variants of the famous Fibonacci sequence. The computer generated Etude for Arpeggione can be seen as an application of graph theory and Réflexions is a short piano work illustrating three types of geometrical symmetries.