By Matt Holsapple
Entertainment Editor

Music is an artistic expression of emotion through melody, harmony and rhythm. Math is a science dealing with the relationship between quantities, numbers and symbols. For Corey Cerovsek, the two seemingly opposite fields are almost one and the same.

Cerovsek should know. By the age of 16, he had earned master's degrees in both fields.

The violin virtuoso who performed a recital in Loeb Playhouse Sunday said that he sees intrinsic connections between the two fields.

"On the philosophical level, I'm convinced that music and math are connected. I was good at both of them, and it makes sense that the same abilities in my head would make me good at both of them," said Cerovsek, now 27.

While he said he feels certain that this connection exists, he is unsure of what it really is.

"It's mostly a gut feeling. If you try to pin it down, it's like grabbing a bar of wet soap. It's hard to listen to music and find the math. It's even worse to take math and say, 'This is artistic.' "

Cerovsek said that during his education, math was something of an unlikely escape for him. He enrolled in Indiana University at the age of 12 to study under Josef Gingold, one of the world's top violinists at the time. Three years later, he had completed bachelor's degrees in music and math.

"Switching from one to the other was quite relaxing. Math is a very idealized geometrical kind of world. It is an entirely different kind of process," Cerovsek said.

While his goals were to earn his degrees in music, the master's in math happened almost by accident.

"I was in the habit of taking all sorts of courses. With math I just kept taking courses almost for fun. I just discovered that I had the requirements; it was almost an afterthought."

Cerovsek has overachieved for his entire career. He began playing both piano and violin when he was around 5 years old. Through elementary and junior high school, he excelled at the violin, but he said his early success did not affect him adversely.

"The weird thing is you get used to it. I was always the kid at school that got to be in music and go on TV. It was fun; I liked being special for something. Growing up in Canada, there were the hockey kids and the soccer kids. I was the music kid," he said.

Cerovsek also said that he doesn't think that entering college at such an early age had an adverse effect on him either. He said that by entering college at a young age, he wasn't interested in parties or socializing like most people are.

"It worked out great because the last grade I went to normally was seventh. I know I was about to enter the year where being ahead academically doesn't help you socially. I think it's really possible that if I had gone into high school, I would have been a really troubled kid," Cerovsek said.

In college, things were different. "Socially, there were no problems. Most of the students thought I was really cute. All of these college girls wanted to adopt me; they were older, so I thought that was great."

Even though he graduated when he was 15, Cerovsek hasn't missed the experiences from college.

"I still appear at student parties. I look really young, so people think that I am an undergraduate."