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Ideas and Creativity (2019)

Tags: musings, research Developing ideas is the central aspect of many professions, including—but certainly not limited to—academic research and software development. It is my impression that we often consider ideas, or creativity in general, to be some magical binary property: you either have ideas and are a creative mastermind, or not.

We all have the potential to be creative; if you do not believe this, think back to when you were younger, or, if possible, watch toddlers playing with toys—their imaginations are boundless and they are able to imbue even the most mundane objects with a sense of wonder and magic. These lines are spoken by Theseus, the duke of Athens, and I am reasonably sure that Shakespeare uses him as the voice of the ‘realists’, the ‘disgruntled ones’ that seem to watch the creative process from the outside and, not being able to replicate it, scoffing it for something that belongs to the realm of ‘madmen’. Both Henri Poincaré and G. H. Hardy, two of the most pre-eminent mathematicians of the last century, allotted time for unconscious processing in their daily routines: they only spent about four hours (!)

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