Steve Rowley writes:
Strangely, and somewhat embarassingly, there's an appendix in my old thesis on approximately this problem.
There are lots of anecdotes in mathematics about mathematicians in later life who've forgotten about work they did earlier. (I think the archetype involves Hilbert hassling a seminar-speaker about some result he used that Hilbert thought wasn't believable, and the speaker responding "Not only is it true, but you're the one who proved it!") And I'm now old enough (47) to have begun to experience this phenomenon first-hand in myself. Question: Is this phenomenon unique (or at least strongest) in math, as opposed to other scientific and/or creative disciplines? I think research in math is about building up intuitions in some mathematical domain and combining those intuitions with the tools in one's technical toolkit to solve some problems in that domain. The trouble is that intuitions have a short half-life, so even if you keep your mental tools from rusting, work you did a decade or two ago is going to seem unfamiliar, and work you did three or four decades ago might seem like the work of another person. I suspect that other fields are more intuitive, and that the projects one completes there sink deeper hooks into memory, because they are more rooted in physical reality, personal history, etc. What do you all think? (And has anyone studied the phenomonon across disciplines?) Jim Propp
Jim & others, I've noticed this often -- on at least two occasions I've wondered about the contents of a paper and read the review in MR and begun to understand what it's about, and finally come to the reviewer's name and discovered it's Richard K Guy. It may be that I follow too avidly the advice of keeping plenty of balls in the air, so that when you drop a few the remainder still form a reasonable spectacle. The following recent example may just be senile decay, but in the UK last month, away from references, but wanting to occupy my time, I worked extensively on a problem, only to come back here and find that I did possess a (fairly recent) ``work in progress'' on this problem from a former student + a coauthor. On leafing through it, and suffering the usual disappointment that most of my results were already known, I noticed a reference to an earlier paper. On looking this up (1999), it turned out to have 4 authors, the above 2 and 2 others, one of whom was me! There's some explanation here: I believe that the other authors just put my name on it in a polite Erd"os-like gesture, but I must have at least discussed the problem with one or more of them. R. On Tue, 1 May 2007, James Propp wrote:
Steve Rowley writes:
Strangely, and somewhat embarassingly, there's an appendix in my old thesis on approximately this problem.
There are lots of anecdotes in mathematics about mathematicians in later life who've forgotten about work they did earlier. (I think the archetype involves Hilbert hassling a seminar-speaker about some result he used that Hilbert thought wasn't believable, and the speaker responding "Not only is it true, but you're the one who proved it!") And I'm now old enough (47) to have begun to experience this phenomenon first-hand in myself.
Question: Is this phenomenon unique (or at least strongest) in math, as opposed to other scientific and/or creative disciplines?
I think research in math is about building up intuitions in some mathematical domain and combining those intuitions with the tools in one's technical toolkit to solve some problems in that domain. The trouble is that intuitions have a short half-life, so even if you keep your mental tools from rusting, work you did a decade or two ago is going to seem unfamiliar, and work you did three or four decades ago might seem like the work of another person.
I suspect that other fields are more intuitive, and that the projects one completes there sink deeper hooks into memory, because they are more rooted in physical reality, personal history, etc.
What do you all think? (And has anyone studied the phenomonon across disciplines?)
Jim Propp
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There's a simple way to avoid forgetting about one's early work. That's to do very little of it. Steve Gray Steve Rowley writes:
Strangely, and somewhat embarassingly, there's an appendix in my old thesis on approximately this problem.
There are lots of anecdotes in mathematics about mathematicians in later life who've forgotten about work they did earlier. (I think the archetype involves Hilbert hassling a seminar-speaker about some result he used that Hilbert thought wasn't believable, and the speaker responding "Not only is it true, but you're the one who proved it!") And I'm now old enough (47) to have begun to experience this phenomenon first-hand in myself. Question: Is this phenomenon unique (or at least strongest) in math, as opposed to other scientific and/or creative disciplines? I think research in math is about building up intuitions in some mathematical domain and combining those intuitions with the tools in one's technical toolkit to solve some problems in that domain. The trouble is that intuitions have a short half-life, so even if you keep your mental tools from rusting, work you did a decade or two ago is going to seem unfamiliar, and work you did three or four decades ago might seem like the work of another person. I suspect that other fields are more intuitive, and that the projects one completes there sink deeper hooks into memory, because they are more rooted in physical reality, personal history, etc. What do you all think? (And has anyone studied the phenomonon across disciplines?) Jim Propp
Quoting James Propp <propp@math.wisc.edu>:
What do you all think? (And has anyone studied the phenomonon across disciplines?)
Well, everybody forgets things, but recently I have been feeling vestiges of this phenomonon. - hvm ------------------------------------------------- www.correo.unam.mx UNAMonos Comunicándonos
participants (4)
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James Propp -
mcintosh＠servidor.unam.mx -
Richard Guy -
Steve Gray