working an idea
Last week, I pulled out a (mathematical) question I wrote down perhaps a couple of years ago. I keep notebooks for various ideas, mathematical ideas and writing ideas primarily, but I don’t date the entries. Rather, they bump up against one and another, waiting to be brought out of the cold and made use of.
Interestingly, reading through, there are some ideas that periodically recur; these are ideas that I think are worthy of some attention, if only because they’re ideas that my brain can’t quite rid itself of.
This idea mentioned at the beginning is not though one of these recurring ideas. Rather, it’s a much more recent idea, one that resulted from the deliberate smacking together of the body of material in the class I’ve been teaching for the past ten years or so, against the body of material that is the halo around my mathematical research.
I’m not going to be explicit about the idea, if only because I’m not yet sure whether it’s an interesting idea, or whether it’s true, but it is interesting to me at present because of its origin, this cross fertilization of teaching and research.
Sitting with a piece of paper and a pen, staring out the window, over the course of the week I made some notes about possible directions of exploration. But what caused the ice to crack and the log jam to break, was talking it through with someone who’d come to my office to talk about something else entirely.,
This reminded me of a (very recent) post in the sense that there is a difference between sitting in isolation and thinking, and talking through an idea with an audience. And I do find this a fascinating difference.
I’ll let you know if this idea goes anywhere. I remain optimistic at the moment,.
multijimbo 