From Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera:
… applied science, purposeful and determined, and pure science, playful and freely curious, continuously support and stimulate each other. The great nation of the future will be the one which protects the freedom of pure science as much as it encourages applied science.
From Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson:
Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. … Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.
I haven’t written a novel, and probably never will, but Stephenson’s remarks describe my experience doing math and especially developing software. I can do simple, routine work in short blocks of time, but I need larger blocks of time to work on complex projects or to be more creative.
Related post: Four hours of concentration
One time a professor asked me about a problem and I suggested a simple solution. He shot down my idea because it wasn’t complex enough. He said my idea would work, but it wasn’t something he could write a paper about in a prestigious journal.
I imagine that sort of thing happens in the real world, though I can’t recall an example. On the contrary, I can think of examples where people were thrilled by trivial solutions such as a two-line Perl script or a pencil-and-paper calculation that eliminated the need for a program.
The difference is whether the goal is to solve a problem or to produce an impressive solution.
Peter Lawler wrote a blog post yesterday commenting on a quote from Walter Percy’s novel The Last Gentleman:
For until this moment he had lived in a state of pure possibility, not knowing what sort of man he was or what he must do, and supposing therefore that he must be all men and do everything. But after this morning’s incident his life took a turn in a particular direction. Thereafter he came to see that he was not destined to do everything but only one or two things. Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
As Lawler summarizes,
Without some such closure — without knowing somehow that you’re “not destined to do everything but only one or two things” — you never get around to living.
It’s taken me a long time to understand that deliberately closing off some options can open more interesting options.
When I was working on my dissertation, I thought someone might scoop my research and I’d have to start over. Looking back, that was ridiculous. For one thing, my research was too arcane for many others to care about. And even if someone had proven one of my theorems, there would still be something original in my work.
Since then I’ve signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) for numerous companies afraid that someone might steal their ideas. Maybe they’re doing the right thing to be cautious, but I doubt it’s necessary.
I think Howard Aiken got it right:
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.
One thing I’ve learned from developing software is that it’s very difficult to transfer ideas. A lot of software projects never completely transition from the original author because no one else really understands what’s going on.
It’s more likely that someone will come up with your idea independently than that someone would steal it. If the time is ripe for an idea, and all the pieces are there waiting for someone to put them together, it may be discovered multiple times. But unless someone is close to making the discovery for himself, he won’t get it even if you explain it to him.
And when other people do have your idea, they still have to implement it. That’s the hard part. We all have more ideas than we can carry out. The chance that someone else will have your idea and have the determination to execute it is tiny.
One life-lesson from math is that sometimes you can solve a problem without doing what the problem at first seems to require. I’ll give an elementary example and a more advanced example.
The first example is finding remainders. What is the remainder when 5,000,070,004 is divided by 9? At first it may seem that you need to divide 5,000,070,004 by 9, but you don’t. You weren’t asked the quotient, only the remainder, which in this case you can do directly. By casting out nines, you can quickly see the remainder is 7.
The second example is definite integrals. The usual procedure for computing definite integrals is to first find an indefinite integral (i.e. anti-derivative) and take the difference of its values at the two end points. But sometimes it’s possible to find the definite integral directly, even when you couldn’t first find the indefinite integral. Maybe you can evaluate the definite integral by symmetry, or a probability argument, or by contour integration, or some other trick.
Contour integration is an interesting example because you don’t do what you might think you need to — i.e. find an indefinite integral — but you do have to do something you might never imagine doing before you’ve seen the trick, i.e. convert an integral over the real line to an integral in the complex plane to make it simpler!
What are some more examples, mathematical or not, of solving a problem without doing something that at first seems necessary?
Chuck Bearden posted this quote from Steve Holmes on his blog the other day:
Usefulness comes not from pursuing it, but from patiently gathering enough of a reservoir of material so that one has the quirky bit of knowledge … that turns out to be the key to unlocking the problem which someone offers.
Holmes was speaking specifically of theology. I edited out some of the particulars of his quote to emphasize that his idea applies more generally.
Obviously usefulness can come from pursuing it. But there’s a special pleasure in applying some “quirky bit of knowledge” that you acquired for its own sake. It can feel like simply walking up to a gate and unlocking it after unsuccessful attempts to storm the gate by force.
The day after President Kennedy challenged America to land a man on the moon,
… the National Space Agency didn’t suit up an astronaut. Instead their first goal was to hit the moon — literally. And just over three years later, NASA successfully smashed Ranger 7 into the moon … It took fifteen ever-evolving iterations before the July 16, 1969, gentle moon landing …
Great scientists, creative thinkers, and problem solvers do not solve hard problems head-on. When they are faced with a daunting question, they immediately and prudently admit defeat. They realize there is no sense in wasting energy vainly grappling with complexity when, instead, they can productively grapple with smaller cases that will teach them how to deal with the complexity to come.
From The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking.
Some may wonder whether this contradicts my earlier post about how quickly people give up thinking about problems. Doesn’t the quote above say we should “prudently admit defeat”? There’s no contradiction. The quote advocates retreat, not surrender. One way to be able to think about a hard problem for a long time is to find simpler versions of the problem that you can solve. Or first, to find simpler problems that you cannot solve. As George Polya said
If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem that you can’t solve; find it.
Bracket the original problem between the simplest version of the problem you cannot solve and the fullest version of the problem you can solve. Then try to move your brackets.
The main difficulty I’ve seen in tutoring math is that many students panic if they don’t see what to do within five seconds of reading a problem, maybe two seconds for some. A good high school math student may be able to stare at a problem for fifteen seconds without panicking. I suppose students have been trained implicitly to expect to see the next step immediately. Years of rote drill will do that to you.
A good undergraduate math student can think about a problem for a few minutes before getting nervous. A grad student may be able to think about a problem for an hour at a time. Before Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, he thought about the problem for seven years.
From Out of the Tar Pit:
… the type of complexity we are discussing in this paper is that which makes large systems hard to understand. It is this that causes us to expend huge resources in creating and maintaining such systems. This type of complexity has nothing to do with complexity theory — the branch of computer science which studies the resources consumed by a machine executing a program. The two are completely unrelated — it is a straightforward matter to write a small program in a few lines which is incredibly simple (in our sense) and yet is of the highest complexity class (in the complexity theory sense).
