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> The author usually spends months discovering things, and going down blind alleys. At the end, he organizes it all into a story that covers up all the mistake
by nathell 9y ago
> The author usually spends months discovering things, and going down blind alleys. At the end, he organizes it all into a story that covers up all the mistakes (and related motivation), and presents the completed idea in clean neat flow. The way to really understand the idea is to re-create what the author left out. Read between the lines.
Pity there's little mathematical writing that actually _does_ contain these blind alleys and mistakes. Part of why I enjoy "Concrete Mathematics" by Graham/Knuth/Patashnik is that it's one of the rare counterexamples.
- chestervonwinch 9y agoI was thinking of ideas for a talk recently, and I thought of "Things I tried that didn't work and one that did" or something to that effect. However, when I looked through my old failed approaches, I found the amount of documentation was proportional to the level of success of the approach, making such a talk nearly impossible.