[FRIAM] math-induced vs. math-described creativity (was Re: TheoremDep)

[glen∈ℂ]

There's a lot to respond to, as always. But, also as always, I'm most attracted to potential conflict. 8^)  And I'm going to be offensive and claim to know you better than you know yourself. >8^D

I'd argue that your personal creativity as a kid wasn't based in math, but based in something more concrete like your physiology and brain wiring.  The math simply turned out to facilitate whatever twitch you'd already manifested.  I'll try to use my go-to anecdote to make my point clearer.  As a kid, my dad consistently accused me of "making excuses" in stead of "providing reasons".  He saw some non-ambiguity in the (social) world that I never saw (still don't see to this day).  Had he been more *logically* inclined, he might have been able to make the distinction clear to me.  After I learned some of the concepts from control theory, I began to realize he (as a former drill sergeant and practicing Catholic) understood personal responsibility as a very interactive, dynamically controlled, always on the lookout, theistic, process.  I tend to be a bit more essentialist and look for critical paths, shaving off the parts of the system that may have less (or negligible) impact on the particular outcome of interest/conflict.

This intolerance for ambiguity, in me, manifested VERY early.  From my incompetent understanding of pop-psy like "All I really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten", my guess is math facilitated your innate creativity as opposed to *founding/basing* your creativity.

But my claim that math would be less successful describing creativity in children than it is in, say, estimating the mass of ultra diffuse galaxies, has more to do with the ambiguity (distinct from uncertainty) in how we understand children.  I suspect you would temporarily abide the claim that a nerd kid who spends all her time playing video games can be just as creative as a more artsy kid who spends her time making up songs on a keyboard.  If we were talking about *adults*, it would be trivial to parse out, disambiguate, how one can be just as creative as another.  But because our understanding of development is so impoverished, it can be difficult to *model* how a child meshes with (relaxes into) the control surface of a keyboard versus that of a game console.

It's not really because "creativity" is ill-defined.  It's because "children" is ill-defined.  Creativity can (and has been) disambiguated in various (inconsistent[†]) ways by various researchers.  We've seen less success disambiguating children.

[†] And, contrary to popular belief, math allows for inconsistency.

On 3/29/19 3:01 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> I would claim that more than a little of my own personal creativity was
> based IN mathematics as a child/adolescent.   It was the abstract
> language of math that allowed me to see (and manipulate?) patterns
> across more disparate domains than "natural language" allowed.   It
> wasn't the lack of ambiguity (because my clumsy application
> re-indroduced ambiguity) in Math that drew me, but the ease and
> expressiveness of abstraction.