Musicians who are also noted scientists

Lehrer’s work often parodied popular song forms, though he usually created original melodies when doing so. A notable exception is "The Elements", where he set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the "Major-General's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Lehrer's early work typically dealt with non-topical subject matter and was noted for its black humor in songs such as "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". In the 1960s, he produced a number of songs that dealt with social and political issues of the day, particularly when he wrote for the U.S. version of the television show That Was the Week That Was. Despite their topical subjects and references, the popularity of these songs has endured; Lehrer quoted a friend's explanation: "Always predict the worst and you'll be hailed as a prophet."^[1]

In the early 1970s, he largely retired from public performances to devote his time to teaching mathematics and music theatre at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Bryan “Dexter” Holland, the Offspring: The pop-punk band the Offspring scored a hit with “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy),” which by 1999 was a radio staple, a popular MTV music video and parodied by “Weird Al” Yankovic. This month, 19 years later, Offspring singer Bryan “Dexter” Holland scored his PhD. He graduated from the University of Southern California with a dissertation in molecular biology, completing the degree he'd put on hold when his Offspring career took off. Holland studies the genetic material of HIV, with an eye to viral destruction.

“Imagine a virus is like a car,” Holland said to radio station KROQ in 2013, after publishing his first scientific paper. “You want to break the car before you get run over. And there’s a lot of ways you can break a car. You can disconnect the battery; you can slash the tires. So, what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to slash the tires of AIDS.”

Mira Aroyo, Ladytron: While Bulgarian-born musician Mira Aroyo was working on her PhD in genetics at Oxford University in 1999, she joined up with the other three members of the British electronic outfit Ladytron. The group has collaborated with bands like Nine Inch Nails and toured with Franz Ferdinand. And Aroyo has collaborated with other molecular geneticists to produce several papers on chromosome segregation.

Greg Graffin, Bad Religion: Greg Graffin, frontman for punk-rock band Bad Religion, has a PhD in zoology from Cornell University. (His thesis, “Monism, Atheism and the Naturalist Worldview: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology,” became the basis for a book.) He has lectured on life sciences and paleontology at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Graffin spends his days on campus,” UCLA magazine noted in 2007, “then at around 5:00 heads to the band's Hollywood studio.”

Art Garfunkel, Simon & Garfunkel: Art Garfunkel earned his master's degree in mathematics at Columbia University in 1967. He began PhD work in math but never finished. Childhood friends Paul Simon and Garfunkel parted ways in the early 1970s, for what was meant to be a brief break. In 1971, the same year the eponymous folk rock duo won a Grammy for album of the year, Garfunkel briefly taught geometry to prep schoolers at Connecticut's Litchfield Academy.

Milo Aukerman is the lead singer for the punk rock band The Descendents, a band that is also from California. (There must be something about the California punk scene that produces scientists.) The band's first studio album was called Milo Goes to College because Aukerman had decided to take some time to study biology. Now, Aukerman also has a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and alternates between working with the band and working on academic research. This makes The Descendents one of the only bands who is on hiatus for reasons of science.

Brian Cox stands out on this list as being more famous these days as a scientist, presenting numerous shows about science for the BBC. He is a particle physicist, a professor at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. But before all that, he was the keyboardist for the pop group D:Ream, who had a number of hits in the UK, including the number one "Things Can Only Get Better."

Dan Snaith is better known as the musician with the stage name "Caribou." Snaith's music is electronic, psychedelic pop dance music. Which would seem a natural fit with his Ph.D. in mathematics from Imperial College London. Snaith's thesis was Overconvergent Siegel Modular Symbols. Caribou's fifth album was called Swim. He also will not stand for the "music and math" stereotype, according to an interview with The Guardian: "To me, that misses the point of maths and it misses the point of music. Pure mathematics at research level is not about sums; it flowers into this whole creative subject. If there's any real similarity between maths and music, it's that with both, you're fumbling around and using your intuition to try to fit things together."

Before founding the band Boston, Tom Scholz was an engineer. He received a bachelor's degree and master's degree and in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a senior product design engineer for Polaroid and was still working there while he recorded the demos for what would be become Boston. Sholz's love for both music and engineering culminated in his invention of the Rockman guitar amplifier.

Diane Nalini de Kerckhov is a Rhodes scholar who recieved her D.Phil (British for Ph.D.) in Materials Science from Oxford in 1999. As Dr. de Kerckhove, she is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Guelph. As Diane Nalini, she is a professional jazz singer. "Most musicians I know have a strong grasp of mathematics," she says. "They have to. Keeping the beat, counting out divisions of beats, thinking about harmony. Music theory is almost dauntingly mathematical."