Guerino Mazzola

Who is Guerino Mazzola?

Guerino Mazzola is a Swiss mathematician, musicologist, jazz pianist as well as book writer.

He graduated at the University of Zürich in Mathematics, Theoretical Physics and Crystallography and completed his PhD in Mathematics in 1971. In 1980, he habilitated in Algebraic Geometry and Representation theory. In 2000, he was awarded the medal of the Mexican Mathematical Society. In 2003, he habilitated in Computational Science at the University of Zürich.

Mazzola has recorded several Free Jazz CDs with musicians like Mat Maneri, Heinz Geisser, Sirone, Jeff Kaiser, Scott Fields, Matt Turner and Rob Brown.

Mazzola is well known for his application of sophisticated mathematical concepts such as topos theory to music theory, described in his book The Topos of Music. The result has been somewhat controversial, drawing praise from some mathematicians and music theorists, and dissent from others.

Currently he is Professor at the School of Music at the University of Minnesota. Since 2007 he is the president of the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music.