3 ms·
That "1%" original is almost always just 1% uncited/unknown inspiration. If you listen to the stories of how things like major inventions came into being, it's
by donatj 4y ago
That "1%" original is almost always just 1% uncited/unknown inspiration.
If you listen to the stories of how things like major inventions came into being, it's almost always some domain expert visited some domain in which they were not an expert and inspiration struck on how to combine the domains.
Otherwise, the rest of invention is either human imitations or improvements to things found in nature or not inventions at all but discoveries stumbled upon by accident/experimentation.
Nothing is just willed into existence by pure "thought". Every thought you've had is a product of the things you've been surrounded by.
- dinkumthinkum 4y agoSo Ramanujan with no formal training in mathematics was really surrounded by advanced education of mathematics and had no original ideas? I feel if more people studied philosophy they may discover how problematic these reductions are.
- donatj 4y agoMath isn't a human invention at all. It's the discovery of the nature of the universe and an expression of the world around us.
- dinkumthinkum 4y agoWhat does that even mean? Mathematical ideas are ideas. The notion of continued fractions is not just an expression of the world around us. This is basically hokum. The point is that human intelligence utilized original thoughts in the case of Ramanujan.
- donatj 4y agoOne of your three sheep is black. 1/3 - that's a fraction, a idealized representation of the real world. Now you take that concept and do it again over and over ad infinitum. That's not a magical invention that has no bearing on the world around us. That's just an expression of real world taken to its logical conclusion. It was not invented from a vacuum, it was invented from the input of the world around us. What is "hokum" is the idea that the human mind would somehow come up with meaningful output without meaningful input to seed it.