The Mathemusician! - Larry Lesser

contact me see “Greatest Lesser Hits” or quotes & resources

“Find, find the value of pi — starts 3 point 1 4 1 5 9.
A good ol’ fraction you may hope to define, but the decimal never dies ….”
— from Larry Lesser’s “American Pi”, winner of the National Museum of Mathematics’ Pi Day of the Century song contest

https://larrylesser.com/poet-larry-ate/

ABOUT THE MATHEMUSICIAN: To support his mission to motivate learning, Professor Lesser integrates 2 great loves – math & music! As the Mathemusician (some say “the Weird Al Yankovic of math ed”), Lesser incorporates song and guitar in interactive classes and keynotes, facilitating explorations and performing songs spanning content such as infinity, pi, and worldly contexts such as the lottery!

Lesser has 25+ awards for educational STEM songs and song videos in national contests (e.g., NSF, ASA, MoMath, CAUSE, QL-SIGMAA, STEM Art and Film Festival) and has given plenary presentation-performances for regional/national audiences of:

mathematicians (e.g., 2008 MAA MathFest, 2014 Bridges),
statisticians (e.g., 2013 USCOTS),
two-year college math faculty (e.g., 2024 NMMATYC),
K-12 teachers (e.g., 2009 NCTM in Nashville to an SRO audience of 800+), and
general audiences (e.g., MoMath 2015 and 2025)
also, on live TV!

His songs yielded meaningful learning gains in an NSF-funded randomized experiment that sparked an award-winning follow-up NSF grant for interactive statistics songs, which led to co-founding the VOICES STEM song conferences featured in Forbes.

Lesser’s math-and-music work has been featured in institutional media (e.g., newsletter or newscast), STEM songwriter media, 2023 and 2025 podcasts, MoMath STARRING MATH, mass media (from Australia to Jamaica!), and live museum events. While he focuses on high school and college, Lesser also produced material for children on a PBS-TV station and in The Mini Page (syndicated supplement in 500+ newspapers with 20 million readers).

As part of broader edutainment work, Lesser has published 100+ STEM lyrics and pioneering papers on:

use of songs/lyrics (Mathematics Teacher ; a highly-viewed paper in J. of Mathematics and the Arts)
math topic-specific songs (J. of Mathematics Education; Primus; Bridges)
guitar/math connections (EJSME),
student-made songs (eCOTS),
song interactiveness (VOICES, J. of Statistics Education),
misconception-addressing songs (Teaching Statistics),
mathematically-structured non-mathematical songs (Bridges).

Over 70% of Larry’s 33 song contest awards and 150+ published songs (and most of his 100+ published poems) are STEM-related, but he’s also had awards, airplay, and album cuts for non-STEM songs, including being a Winner and 4-time Finalist in the 34th New Mexico Music Awards and being longlisted for GRAMMY and IFMA (International Folk Music Awards)!