ATTENTION TOP AND BOTTOM
turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical questions, apparently without much success," wrote the nineteenth-century French mathematician Henri Poincare. "Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside."1
There, as he walked on a bluff above the ocean one morning, the insight suddenly came to him "that the arithmetical transfor mations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry."
The specifics of that proof do not matter here (fortunately so: I could not begin to understand the math myself). What's intriguing about this illumination is how it came to Poincare: with "brevity, suddenness, and immediate certainty." He was taken by surprise.
The lore of creativity is rife with such accounts. Carl Gauss,
an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mathematician, worked on proving a theorem for four years, with no solution. Then, one day, the answer came to him "as a sudden flash of light." Yet he could not name the thread of thought that connected his years of hard work with that flash of insight.
Why the puzzle? Our brain has two semi-independent, largely separate mental systems. One has massive computing power and operates constantly, purring away in quiet to solve our problems,
'surprising us with a sudden solution to complex pondering. Since it
ATTENTION TOP AND BOTTOM
turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical questions, apparently without much success," wrote the nineteenth-century French mathematician Henri Poincare. "Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside."1
There, as he walked on a bluff above the ocean one morning, the insight suddenly came to him "that the arithmetical transfor mations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry."
The specifics of that proof do not matter here (fortunately so: I could not begin to understand the math myself). What's intriguing about this illumination is how it came to Poincare: with "brevity, suddenness, and immediate certainty." He was taken by surprise.
The lore of creativity is rife with such accounts. Carl Gauss,
an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mathematician, worked on proving a theorem for four years, with no solution. Then, one day, the answer came to him "as a sudden flash of light." Yet he could not name the thread of thought that connected his years of hard work with that flash of insight.
Why the puzzle? Our brain has two semi-independent, largely separate mental systems. One has massive computing power and operates constantly, purring away in quiet to solve our problems,
'surprising us with a sudden solution to complex pondering. Since it
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