All in the Family: Creativity Across the Disciplines Through Three Brothers

Baylor University will host a special panel discussion on Wednesday, April 25 on the subject of creativity seen through the eyes of three academic brothers Ted Chihara (Mathematician, Purdue), Charles Chihara (Philosopher, University of California Berkeley), and Paul Chihara (Musician, UCLA). This one hour event will begin at 7:30 pm in the Kayser Auditorium of the Hankamer School of Business.

This event is co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, The College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Music. Dr. Kevin Dougherty, from Baylor’s Department of Sociology, will serve as host and moderator of this event.

Here are short biographical sketches of each of the Chihara brothers.

Ted Chihara earned his Ph.D. in mathematics, under the supervision of Arthur Rosenthal, from Purdue University in 1955. He is a well known mathematician because of his fundamental work in the field of orthogonal polynomials and for his influential textbook An Introduction to Orthogonal Polynomials. Ted has his name associated with several mathematical objects, including the Al-Salam-Chihara polynomials, the Brenke-Chihara polynomials, and the Chihara-Ismail polynomials. He has held positions at Seattle University, the University of Alberta, the University of Victoria, and Purdue University.

Charles Chihara earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Washington in 1960. He then spent an academic year studying analytical philosophy and Wittengstein’s philosophy of mathematics with Elizabeth Anscombe at Oxford University. After Oxford he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington and then the University of Illinois, before becoming, in 1963, a member of the philosophy faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. Shortly after, he joined the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science—a graduate program which the great logician Alfred Tarski had recently formed at Berkeley. During his 37 years on the faculty there, he won a number of prestigious fellowships, and published many articles in the philosophy of mathematics and logic. His publications include numerous works in the philosophy of science and confirmation theory, as well as on the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Russell, Quine, Goodman and Davidson. He is the author of Ontology and the Vicious Circle Principle (1973), Constructibility and Mathematical Existence (1990), The Worlds of Possibility: Model Realism and the Semantics of Modal Logic (1998), and A Structural Account of Mathematics (2004). His latest book, "In the wake of the Frege-Hilbert Dispute" is expected to be finished in the next year.

Paul Chihara earned his Doctorate in Musical Arts in 1965 from Cornell, studying with Robert Palmer. He also studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Ernst Pepping in West Berlin, and Gunther Schuller in Tanglewood. He was the first composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Neville Marriner. Paul is a member of the music faculty at UCLA, where he is the head of the Visual Media Program at UCLA. Chihara's prize-winning concert works, which include symphonies, concertos, chamber music, choral compositions, and ballets, have been performed to great acclaim both nationally and internationally. His works have been commissioned by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Roger Wagner Chorale, the Naumberg Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His close connection with music for dramatic forms extends into film and television for which he has written nearly 100 scores. He has worked with directors Sidney Lumet, Louis Malle, Michael Ritchie, and Arthur Penn. His movie credits include Prince of the City, The Morning After and Crossing Delancey. He also composed the score for Shogun: The Musical, based on James Clavell's novel. Paul has had several notable students, including James Horner, Christopher Brady, Matthew Tommasini, Sean Friar, Jeff Kryka, Joseph Trapanese, and Cynthia Tse Kimberlin.