"Jean-Pierre Serre famously said that writing his revolutionary paper on coherent sheaves didn’t require any thinking. Everything fell so naturally into place that his typewriter generated the 100 pages entirely by itself, as if the article had pre-existed.
But I wasn’t Jean-Pierre Serre and he wouldn’t lend me his typewriter. This is why my brightest mathematical idea never made it to publication."
https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-theorem-economy
"Official math manifests itself as a formal deduction system where you start from axioms and mechanically derive theorems. This is a nerd’s paradise, a world where truth takes binary values, reasoning is either valid or invalid, and there is technically no room for bullshit.
Secret math is the human part of the story—why official math was invented, how we can successfully interact with it, its effects on our brains, and the bizarre mental techniques through which mathematicians continuously expand its territory.
Secret math never made it to the curriculum, because it lacks the defining qualities of official math, and also because it feels peripheral. Official math is cold, hard, logical, objective, and it is rumored to be the language of the universe. Secret math is soft, fuzzy, subjective and, by contrast, it looks like cheap pedagogical backstory."
#histsci #histmath
Abie