Role in Scientific and Mathematical Discovery
Important scientific discoveries have been made through imaginative cognition, such as Kekulé’s famous discovery of the carbon ring structure of benzene through a dream of a snake eating its tail. Hadamard suggested that imagination (and beauty) play central roles in mathematical creativity.
Read more about this topic: Active Imagination
Famous quotes containing the words role, scientific, mathematical and/or discovery:
“The trouble is that the expression ‘material thing’ is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for ‘sense-datum’; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he ‘perceives.’”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)
“The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic.... It is all the more serious since, with the loss of my rule V, not only the foundations of my arithmetic, but also the sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish.”
—Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)