Kevin Short is a cool mathematician. So cool that the University of New Hampshire calculus professor was nominated for a Grammy. Which pretty much makes him as cool as Beyoncé.

Short, 44, was picked for his role in restoring a 1949 bootleg of a Woody Guthrie concert, one of three live recordings of the Dust Bowl Balladeer and the only public one. The concert was recorded on wire, a long-outdated medium. After music producers painstakingly digitized all 75 minutes of it, they called Short.

Short's expertise is in chaos theory. Put simply, Short had figured out how to use controlled chaotic systems to compress music. He patented a technology in 2000 that allows music to be downloaded to cell phones. In 2006, he turned his attention to restoring music warped by old audio equipment.

Short soon teamed up with Jamie Howarth, the founder of a Massachusetts audio restoration company who's restored recordings ranging from the Oklahoma! soundtrack to the Grateful Dead. The result was The Live Wire, a CD of 10 songs by Guthrie interspersed with the legendary folk singer's live concert chatter.

Short's job was to develop algorithms, or processes, to correct imperfections in the sound caused by poor, decades-old recording technology. Basically, he had to make a muffled recording not so muffled.

"We started running the (digitized) tracks through algorithms to improve them," Short said. "In some cases, the music was so degraded we had to go in and hand-tweak things. . . . Jamie is the recording engineer. I'm sort of in the background saying, 'Hmmm, can I improve that algorithm?' "

But the process of transforming the rare Woody Guthrie recording from a kinked wire to a Grammy-nominated album began way before Short or Howarth got involved. It began with a strange package mailed to the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York City in 2001, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Nora Guthrie, Woody Guthrie's youngest surviving child and the director of the archives, recalled that no one in the office wanted to open the heavy, awkwardly wrapped, brown-paper package.

"When we finally did get up the courage to open it, there were four spools of heavy metal. They looked like fishing reels," she said. "(They) said 'Woody and Marjorie, 1949.' No note, no letter."

The spools were from Paul Braverman, an elderly man who found them in his closet while in the process of moving. Braverman, who died two years after donating the spools, had recorded a Woody Guthrie concert at Fuld Hall in Newark, N.J., in 1949 while he was a student at Rutgers University.

Eight months passed before the archives folks found someone who could transfer whatever was on the mystery wire to a computer. Nora Guthrie had never before heard a live recording of her father and, after 17 hours of transferring the sound, said she was shocked when she realized what they had.

"The machine went on and, 'Oh my God, that's my father. And that's my mother! There seems to be people in the background and, are they doing a show?' " Guthrie said. "After the 75 minutes (of recording) was up . . . (I said) 'Is this what I think it is? . . . This was a live performance, wasn't it?' "

It took another few years for Nora Guthrie to decide to release the recording, mostly because she figured there wouldn't be much interest. Woody Guthrie's popularity ebbs and flows depending on current popular culture, she said. But in the past two years, two fortuitous things happened: A Woody Guthrie song, "I'm Shipping Up to Boston," was covered by the Celtic punk band The Dropkick Murphys and used in Martin Scorsese's Boston crime flick, The Departed. The same song served as the soundtrack for the Red Sox's World Series win and, famously, pitcher Jonathan Papelbon's jig.

"I guess Woody is sort of in the air," Nora Guthrie said.

That, coupled with the Grammy nomination for best historical album, has caused sales of the album to explode. Nora Guthrie said everyone involved has been floored by its success, especially since no one in 1949 would have thought a recording by a little-known folk singer would be worth anything.

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