Rock Bands and Math Pods

One evening several years ago we spoke with some professional musicians. The conversation traveled to how rock bands sometimes choose their names. We laughed at some of the totally off the wall names that get selected.

The musicians got serious and said that there is an actual method for choosing these names. They actually learned this method of free association name selecting in one of their classes in college.

Well this piqued our curiosity and we simply had to learn more. It turns out that the method is a permutation of random participles (verbal modifying words often ending in "ing" or "ed"), adjectives, and plural nouns, . It's a fun exercise in exploring verbal possibilities. We were so impressed that several of our teaching staff at themathlab.com now teach this method, along with its mathematical relevance, to choose group names.

Here's what you do:

Take a sheet of notebook paper and fold it into thirds, creating three long columns. At the top of the first write participles, at the top of the second write adjectives, and at the top of the third write nouns.

Next your group simply brainstorms, and you write the first 15 words that come to mind in those three category columns.

*It works better if you have two to four people throwing out words.

It will look something like this when you are done.

participles
adjectives
nouns
running
pretty
turtles
swimming
green
alligators
eaten
wrinkly
chairs
farting
gray
cars
yelling
fat
VCRs
raining
skinny
computer chips
saved
sharp
trolls
bent

smooth

Chihuahuas
singing
hairy
hearts
burping
bald
cows
laughing
green
nailguns
crying
black
ladders
weightlifting
shiny
paint guns
slenderizing
wet
poodles
hottubbing
wiry
paper

Now you simply pick one word from each column completely at random and form a group name.

*NOTE: the participle is always written first, then the adjective, and last the noun.

For example:

slenderizing wet trolls
eaten green chihuahuas
laughing black nailguns
bent bald cows
farting grey poodles

Some of the names will be boring but some will make you burst out laughing. The idea is to find a memorable name.

There a quite a few possible names from this group of three columns of fifteen. Any name from the first column can be paired with any name from the second column, and any name from the second column can be paired with any name from the third column. So to figure out how many different names are possible we just multiply 15x15x15. Technically this is known in the math world as a permutation. The number of possible names from these three columns of 15 words is 3,375.

Go ahead, experiment! Make your own lists, and see if you can find a cool name for your garage band or math "pod".

Copyright © 1999-2020 themathlab.com


Google