jcbrand on Nostr: A while back I read an interview with the mathematician Conway where he said ...
A while back I read an interview with the mathematician Conway where he said something that I regularly think of.
To be a great mathematician, you have to be comfortable with something not being finished, not knowing when it'll be finished or whether it'll ever be finished (by you). You might work on a proof for years, not knowing whether you'll actually solve it.
Whenever I have anxiety around some unfinished project at work, I think of this quote. I'm not a mathematician, but we can all learn to accept ambiguity and incompleteness.
I'm fact, the mathematician Gödel, showed that every conceivable mathematical framework is incomplete, because it contains unprovable statements.
To be a great mathematician, you have to be comfortable with something not being finished, not knowing when it'll be finished or whether it'll ever be finished (by you). You might work on a proof for years, not knowing whether you'll actually solve it.
Whenever I have anxiety around some unfinished project at work, I think of this quote. I'm not a mathematician, but we can all learn to accept ambiguity and incompleteness.
I'm fact, the mathematician Gödel, showed that every conceivable mathematical framework is incomplete, because it contains unprovable statements.