A 'math nerd' and Grammy nominee

Kevin Short was nominated for helping to restore a 1949 wire recording of Woody Guthrie. (Geoff Forester for The Boston Globe)

What does a father have to do for his children to think he's cool? When Matt Damon was recently named People Magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive," he said that his stepdaughter thought he was "cooler," though not quite all the way there.

Kevin Short, a mathematics professor at the University of New Hampshire, had similar luck with his four children when he was recently nominated for a Grammy Award. "Their party line is still that I'm a math nerd," Short said. "And I can't be cool because I'm a dad."

Short, 44, is part of a team that has received a Grammy nomination in the best historical album category for a tricky restoration of a wire recording - an analog recording in which the sound is magnetically stored on a wire spool - of a 1949 concert by Woody Guthrie. It's the only-known recording of a live performance by the folk music legend.

A specialist in signal processing and chaos theory, Short said he applied some of the same mathematical ideas to "The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949" that he first explored over a decade ago when he and another mathematician were looking for ways to analyze ice core data.

"Some years the ice is thick, some years it's thin," said Short. "It's stretched and distorted just like the wire recording."

The wire recording arrived mysteriously at the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York City in 2001 - so mysteriously, and so soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, that there was initial concern that it might be a bomb. It turned out that the box of wires had been sent by a New Jersey man who made the historic recording and then kept it in a closet for decades.

But the delicacy of the wire, sections of which had become stretched and damaged, required some high-tech thinking to bring it into the digital age, according to Jamie Howarth, the president of Plangent Processes, the Nantucket-based company that oversaw the restoration.

To fix the speed and pitch of the recording, Howarth said his team had re-rendered the entire recording using an application for which Short wrote the stretching and compressing algorithm.

"He's been really instrumental in helping us maintain a high level of quality by using the cutting edge math he's so good at," said Howarth, whose company has also used that algorithm to restore the soundtrack to the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and the audio from a 1976 Grateful Dead concert.

Though he has a background in hardcore theoretical physics and chaos theory, Short is no stranger to the music industry. After an early career in which he worked on such projects as predicting the seismic background noise of the earth and using chaos theory to break secure transmissions - work that got him noticed by the CIA and National Security Administration - he hit upon a way to control chaotic systems to get periodic behavior that turned out to have huge ramifications for the data industry.

Short created something called "chaotic compression theory," which used nonlinear mathematical equations to produce complex waveforms - which he called cupolets - to replace the data in audio and video files. The process is as complex as it sounds, but its impact, in layman's terms, was to allow for the compression of large amounts of digital data.

Short took this technology into the private sector in 2000 and founded a company now called Groove Mobile, which was the first company to offer music downloads to cellphones in the United States and Europe and remains a leader in the field.

About a year and a half ago, Short left Groove Mobile because he said it was taking him away from his true love.

"At my core, I'm really a researcher," Smith said from his office in Kingsbury Hall on the UNH campus. "Research gets under my skin. I have a hard time putting something down once I get into it. I need things that are mathematically challenging, that force you out of your comfort zone, that slap you in the face and tell you that world is even more complicated than you'd thought."

On his slate for the future are projects using mathematics to create better hearing aids and refine techniques to detect trace materials used in making improvised explosive devices.

Short is unsure of whether he'll make the Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles on Feb. 10. But win or lose, he hopes his small brush with stardom will help people - and especially his kids - realize that there's more to the "math nerds" than numbers on a chalkboard.

"This goes to show that math really can do things that can touch people," he said.

Fact sheet

Hometown: Suffern, N.Y.; lives in Durham, N.H.

Education: Played baseball at the University of Rochester, where he received degrees in physics and geology in 1985; won a Marshall Scholarship to attend Imperial College at the University of London, where he earned a doctorate in theoretical physics in 1988.

Family: Wife, Michelle, is a physical therapist. They have four children: Timothy, 16, Gabrielle, 13, Aidan, 10, and Kristin, 8.

Hobbies: Short said his main hobby is "chasing my kids around," but he still likes to play baseball and enjoys skiing and mountain biking.