I’m just skimming through my Head of Department’s copy of The Problems of Mathematics* by Ian Stewart on a beautiful sunny day of the Southern Hemisphere spring. It’s a Friday, and I have a lot of work to do, but frankly I’m a little bored with all of it at the moment. Perhaps this is a good thing. I just came across this passage in the book, which I quote here from page 32 of the 1987 copy.
Weil tells us that in 1947, while in Chicago,
I felt bored and depressed, and, not knowing what to do, I started reading Gauss’s two memoirs on biquadratic residues, which I had never read before.
Hold, hold, gentle reader. You and I might not respond in such a way when faced by boredom, though perhaps we should, since after outlining a few observations he made on Gauss’s work, Weil continues
This led me to conjecture about varieties over finite fields . . .
And thus were born the Weil Conjectures, amongst the most critical developments of Twentieth Century mathematics.
From boredom.
Where did I put my pen . . .
*I wanted to hyperlink to amazon here, but this book isn’t listed. Suprisingly, it also isn’t listed on Stewart’s website. What the Dickens?
Filed under: creativity, mathematics | Tagged: boredom, chicago, gauss, ian stewart, math, mathematician, mathematics, maths, stewart, weil, weilc conjectures
*The book is in print, just with a new title
http://www.amazon.com/Here-Infinity-Ian-Stewart/dp/0192832026
Don’t know whether this is a valid comment here, but i’ve always been amused that bedroom is an anagram of boredom!
What a great subject. Thanks Srinivas for the anagram. I don’t even think I’ve written about the relationship between boredom and slow.
Phil, what would you list as the benefits of boredom?
Yours in gratitude,
Christopher
Mikey, thanks a lot! I should have guessed.
Srinivas, I simply don’t know what to say
Zenbad (nice one, Christopher!), I like your question and it deserves more thought than I’m going to give it, but plowing on regardless . . . one benefit is time, another is mode of thought, and a final is stochastic felicity.
Time: boredom implies time on your hands, I find. Perhaps I have little to do, and so feel bored. More likely, I have a ton of things to do, but am bored with it so either (a) procrastinate or (b) do it anyway but let my mind enter a neverland of dreams. Either way, I gain time to ponder things which I otherwise would not give time to.
Mode of thought: the fuzziness of a bored mind lends itself to slower modes of thought, don’t you find? Very undermind. This ties in nicely with the “time” benefit above.
Stochastic felicity: I think I just invented this term, but it scans well. By it I mean something like “random luck”: wandering around my office I’ll pick distractedly at a book or a discarded journal article, and before I know it my undermind has spotted a phrase or equation which just happens to be the vital link in an unsolved puzzle I’m working on. Felcitious, and stochastic.