Vijay Iyer walked away from a physics PhD at UC Berkeley in 1995, after a Yale degree in math and physics and a Berkeley master's in physics, to build his own interdisciplinary doctoral program studying the cognitive structures of African and African-American music. This episode explores how he got there: born in 1971 in Albany, New York, and raised in Fairport near Rochester as the son of Indian immigrants, he received 15 years of formal Western classical violin training starting at age three while teaching himself piano entirely by ear. By 1994 he was working with innovators like Steve Coleman and George Lewis, and his 1998 dissertation, Microstructures of Feel, applied embodied and situated cognition to the music of the African diaspora, arguing that physical groove is itself a form of intelligence.

The conversation unpacks how mathemati ...