Clippings

As with many scholars, the life of a mathematician is dominated by an insatiable curiosity, a desire bordering on passion to solve the problems he is studying, which can cut him off completely from the realities around him. The absent-mindedness of eccentricity of famous mathematicians comes simply from this. The fact is that the discovery of a mathematical proof is usually reached only after periods of intense and sustained concentration, sometimes renewed at intervals over months or years before the hooked-for answer is found. Gauss himself acknowledged that he spent several years seeking the sign of an algebraic equation, and Poincaré, on being asked how he made his discoveries, answered “by thinking about them often”…