The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field

The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field
Author: Jacques Hadamard | Publisher: Dover Publications | ISBN-10: 0486201074 | 1954 Year | djvu, 145 pages | English | 6,4 MB
This is a short study of how creative thought works. Hadamard, a world-class mathematician best known for his proof of the prime number theorem in 1896, wrote this in the 40's, basing it on correspondence with many of the great living mathematicians of his time. The actual questions he posed are preserved in an appendix. Most of his respondents were mathematicians (and he limited his correspondence to the best minds in the field), but he did get information from several other fields, and cites data about physicists (a letter from Einstein forms another appendix), chemists, physiologists, metaphysicians, and so on.

Here is a discussion of Sidgwick, an economist: "His reasonings on economic questions were almost always accompanied by images, and the images were often curiously arbitrary and sometimes almost undecipherably symbolic. For example, it took him a long time to discover that an odd symbolic image which accompanied the word 'value' was a faint, partial image of a man putting something on a scale."
Many other examples are given, from Mozart to Polya to Galton to Poincare. Hadamard makes it clear that language and thought are not the same thing, contrary to a commonly expressed view among linguists. (Amazon).


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