Mathematicians are very much like artists in the sense that they won’t shut up about the need to “use your creativity.”

That being said I have yet to hear a math prof tell someone they need to take more creative risks, maybe that’s also in my future… hmm.

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.