One half of Simon & Garfunkel is also a man with a master’s degree in mathematics from Columbia University (“I love numbers, and I play with percentages all the time.”). With his friend Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel recorded five studio albums, each one unique. But when they called it quits, it was back to something he enjoyed most. In 1971, he briefly taught geometry to prep schoolers at Connecticut’s Litchfield Academy

Sound bite: “We make weird left and right turns in our lives. You imagine that the country and not the city is where you want to be, that a cottage in the country might be good. I got in front of the kids and put geometry stuff on the blackboard and I would say, ‘Yeah, I’ve had Bridge Over Troubled Water, but we’re not going to talk about that, we’re going to talk about geometry, and at the end of the year I’ll deal with the fame trip,’” he told The Guardian.

Brian May File picture

Astrophysicist Brian May

Freddie Mercury has namechecked Galileo Galilei in Bohemian Rhapsody but it was a nod to Brian May, who began his astrophysics research in 1970. He then put a stop to his “other” work for over three decades, only to return to his celestial work and in 2007 published a PhD dissertation titled A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.

Sound bite: “When I was about to finish my thesis, it was just the beginnings of Queen and I had to make that choice. And my choice was made on the assumption that I wasn’t very good at physics and I might be quite good at music. The thesis I had been working on was on zodiacal dust — the dust clouds in the solar system. When I began, it was a hot topic, but in that 30 years it kind of lapsed. What happened very luckily for me, however, people began discovering dust clouds around other suns, in other solar systems. And suddenly my subject became very in-demand again,” Brian May has told Time.

Engineer Tom Scholz

More Than a Feeling, Peace of Mind, Don’t Look Back… these are hit numbers by the rock band Boston. And the founder of the band is Tom Scholz, who’s also an engineer and inventor. As a child, he was taking things apart or putting parts together. He graduated MIT and then joined Polaroid Corporation as a senior product design engineer. But, of course, he was also a man who grew up listening to the Kinks, Yardbirds and Animals.

Sound bite: “Having the basic Newtonian physics was such a blessing. I realised when I got out into the world that I understood things about how a guitar worked and why it sounded the way it did and why it responded to various things that you might do with it, and other people had no idea what was actually happening — they knew it would make a sound if they did this but they didn’t know why. So it gave me a leg up on being able to translate the sound I was looking for or hoping for or dreaming of and actually get it to happen,” Tom Scholz has told National Academy of Engineering.

Evolutionary biologist Greg Graffin

Bad Religion is known for loud but melodic punk and has been a big influence on the music scene. But the group’s lead vocalist and co-founder has another passion — evolutionary biology. Among the books he has authored are Evolution and Religion, Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God, and Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence.

Sound bite: “When I was a teenager, science meshed with my developing ideals — such as the challenge to authority that was central to punk rock. In science, anyone from any walk of life could make a discovery that would overturn prevailing hypotheses…. I got interested in palaeontology and vertebrate history — sparked by books on human evolution — then vertebrate evolution. Studying with palaeontologists kindled my interest in fieldwork. I struggled to keep one foot in music and one in academia. I had worked on my PhD for three years full-time before I realised Bad Religion could be a legitimate career. We had tour offers from 12 countries,” he has told Nature.

Molecular biologist Milo Aukerman

The debut album of punk rockers the Descendents was aptly titled, Milo Goes to College. In high school, Milo Aukerman was fascinated by the discovery of the structure of DNA. Also, growing up in Los Angeles, punk rock was all over the place. The scene was blossoming and he was listening to Black Flag, the Germs, X and the Minutemen. What followed was constant switching between two careers and not giving up on either.

Sound bite: “Sometimes when the science is getting (to be) a little more of a drudge, that’s when I just turn to music and figure, well, now I’m going to take my creative energy and focus on music for a while. Then maybe a couple of months later, the science takes the driver’s seat, and that ends up being where my creative energies go,” he has told American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Molecular biologist Dexter Holland

We know the man as part of Offspring and for the hit Pretty Fly (for a White Guy), which was pretty much played on a loop on MTV. Holland also has a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Southern California. He had put his studies on hold for years to focus on rock ’n’ roll and success came in heaps. His dissertation is on the molecular dynamics of HIV and general virus/host interactions. Former (and founding) Offspring drummer James Lilja is also a gynecologic oncologist.

Sound bite: “My research focused on the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, the virus which causes AIDS. I am interested in virology and wanted to contribute in some small way to the knowledge which has been learned about HIV and AIDS. This terrible disease remains a worldwide epidemic,” Holland had said in a statement.