There are 3 main categories of books about creativity, in my opinion:
Self-help books (which are, in my opinion, terribly useless, though they sometimes include a few interesting ideas).
Books written by researchers (which tend to make more objective claims and which I personally find more interesting).
Books written by journalists, which tend to be either/or.
So I want to talk about this poster briefly (it’s from Michèle Provost’s installation at the SAW gallery)1.
Mainly, I want to talk about why I dislike it.
The text on the poster was “Words will always be this clumsy approximation of something that can be best explained through drawing.” I’m not including the actual photo, because it looks terrible.
The first time I saw the poster it wasn’t even at the show – it was on a picture my friend took of the installation on her phone so she could tell me about it, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
My favourite sentence to pull out when a bunch of people start having technical discussions and act like I’m not there is “I understood about 5% of what you just said.”
Never be afraid to tell someone you have no clue what they’re talking about (and definitely ask them to explain).
Mathematicians definitely spend just as much time throwing around the word “creativity” as people in more conventionally artistic fields.
I was reading a bunch of articles written by math people and noticed this, and then I remembered that the math contests I wrote in high school all had some spiel about expressing creativity on them.
I also found contest math to actually be interesting, despite being pretty disastrous at it (which… most people are too but still). Like I remember once banging my head against some practice problem until someone pointed out a super elegant solution to me and I was like, how does your brain even do that???? I hate the way math is taught in school.
If you ever buy a printer, here’s a short PSA:
If you’re using a laser printer, no matter what paper you use, everything will come out looking the same, because the toner sits on top on the paper (so the surface you’ll end up looking at will be bonded toner, not paper). This can be good or bad, depending on how suitable the toner look is for what you’re doing.