in the best cases it requires the invention of new techniques. The mathematician doesn’t proceed like a detective to find the solution of his problem. He/She is not a computer of deductions, but he/she proceeds by means of experimentation (that doesn’t use tubes or expensive equipment), by means of induction and, if there is luck, inspiration.

Art and the science are exclusively human activities. More than half of the human cultivated knowledge, i.e. culture, is constituted by scientific knowledge. This is a fact broadly unknown to most people who think that culture is only constituted by literary or artistic knowledge. It is a great mistake to see culture in this way.

If instead of wondering what relationship exists between music and mathematics did we wonder what relationship it exists between mathematicians and musicians, we could say that some mathematicians adore music, many with a similar focus to the esthetic measure of Birkhoff. Many mathematicians like the mental order, they come to music as if it were mathematics but without having to fight with an inflexible logic. They like more Mozart than Stockhausen, Schoenberg or Bartók. However many musicians don’t like mathematics, generally because they don’t know anything about them. There are some musicians who like mathematics (Mozart, Bartók, Ponce, among others).

If we wonder more than how they are related, in what they look alike, we could say that, for those who see science and art as an Olympic activity where he or she have to be highly competitive, productive and to belong to the big commercial leagues, mathematics and music are used as a means and not as an end or finality. In this way, some musicians determine to play the largest number of notes in the smallest possible time and you will already imagine the equivalent among mathematicians.

The human being is a product of an evolutionary process that began about 4000 million years ago. In less than ten million years the first beings that resembled the human appeared and hardly some millions of years ago the first human beings emerged. But almost yesterday we have had culture, only for about two thousand years. The great musical works were composed only 350 years ago and almost, except the geometry of Euclid, all mathematics dates of also 350 years ago. Our cultural core is relatively new and recent. We can lose it with a lot of easiness. Whenever a society is in crisis, the most vulnerable thing and the first things to disappear are art and science. It seems that the human society and their governments don’t want to realize how delicate and thin the artistic and scientific creation is. This creativity is what distinguishes the human being from the animals and that putting an end to its artists and scientists is to put an end to culture and civilization. To recover them is too difficult and the price is incommensurable. It is the same thing as the destruction of the Library of Alexandria by the barbarians. A nation, town or family that cannot cultivate knowledge is destined to burn its libraries. People that don’t know history, that don’t know the big mistakes that have been made, is destined to make them again, and unfortunately this is happening all over the world.

Let us remember that science and art are essentially human activities. If one thinks of the characteristics mathematics has, as I have explained some, mathemat-