The chemistry professor who set thermodynamics to music
Tallahassee, Florida, US · Oliver Steinbock
Published July 22, 2026
Oliver Steinbock used AI to turn dense physical-chemistry equations into a playlist of songs, so the ideas would lodge in memory the way a jingle does.
The story
The person and the place
Oliver Steinbock, a chemistry professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who noticed how a tune sticks in your head in a way a textbook page rarely does.
The problem they cared about
Thermodynamics is one of the topics students most dread, and the trick of setting facts to music, common for language learners, is almost never used in the sciences.
The agency moment
He wrote the lyrics for a thermodynamics concept himself, adjusted them so the science stayed correct, then used the AI music tool Suno to turn each one into a song, in genres from country to K-pop, a 16-track playlist.
The songs turn equations you can barely read into lines you can sing, like "T is how U answers S / When volume holds its breath" for T = (∂U/∂S)V. The workflow was written up in Nature Reviews Chemistry, and an independent chemistry educator at Cardiff called it "an absolute work of genius."
"There's something between music and memory. Jingles and tunes are often stuck in your head for a very long time." — Oliver Steinbock, C&EN
Verified sources
Sources
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Sources last verified July 23, 2026.