Theoretically speaking

Word count: 318                                                                                       Reading time: 1 minute +

When I first confided to a photographer friend that I had started writing fiction, he shook his head.

“An accountant? Writing fiction?” he said. “I don’t know about that combination.”

I was confident enough to ignore his doubt and charge on through. I figured out back in grade 8 or so that math demands a lot of imaginative problem-solving. Furthermore, anyone who has ever tried to tame the complex tendrils of a business operation into the few thin lines of a balance sheet knows how much creative thinking is involved.

Recently I watched Constraints and Creativity in Mathematics and Fiction, by Dr. Hannu Rajaniemi author of The Quantum Thief. Rajaniemi says that mathematics and writing both create something out of nothing. He urges writers to consider the parallels. Both mathematics and writing:

• are not about the numbers,
• conceive of different realities,
• look at the relationship between the imaginary things and draw conclusions from what is studied and
• should create something beautiful.

After I watched the video I lost myself down a rabbit hole, looking at relationships between mathematics and art. I discovered that because mathematics is the basis of all sound, music theorists often use it to understand music. Mathematics and visual art have a relationship that dates back to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks who defined the golden ratio to describe something that was aesthetically pleasing.

I’m not saying that all mathematicians can be writers (or painters or musicians) or vice versa. I’m suggesting that creativity is a force that once unleashed in one area of our lives will spill into all others. And let’s face it, a huge part of creativity is just hard work, lots of practice, and a mountain of perseverance.

What outside, non-core skills have helped your writing? Were you a midwife or a soldier before you picked up a pen? How have creative habits from another discipline advanced your development?

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Photo by: Alan Bolitho

Comments

[Judy Backhouse]

My background is as a scientist, process-driven and wondering at our natural world. Recently I have started to enjoy patchworking and quilting. My teacher tells me I am good at it because I approach my work with precision and understand how things fit together. We agreed I am currently an artisan. I hope that as I unleash my creative potential I will also become an artist.

[Lynn Crymble]

I was a teacher so being organized and looking ahead helped. How I've changed is that I no longer think I know all the answers. The ones in the back of the book ... Now I see that there are many ways to write and the process and the journey are different for everyone. As for the math thingy ... are you talking 'creative accounting', Maggie? Hmm. Math should create something aesthetically pleasing? Wow, this blows my mind. I know if you type the numbers 77345 into a calculator and then turn it upside down it spells out 'shell'. Is this what you're talking about? Cool.

[Maggie Bolitho]

G'day Judy - thanks for dropping by!

I think science is creative. What is creativity if isn't seeing the relationships between things and interpreting them in a way that lets other people understand the universe better? If it weren't for scientific curiosity we'd be living in caves still and lighting fires with 2 sticks.

You're a brilliant scientist and I know excel at whatver you try!

Maggie

[Maggie Bolitho]

Good evening, Lynn,

I love this line → “How I've changed is that I no longer think I know all the answers. The ones in the back of the book”

“As for the math thingy ... are you talking 'creative accounting', Maggie?”

If you mean wink-wink-nudge-nudge *creative accounting*, yes that qualifies! ;-). More I meant that for an accountant to accommodate the myriad of end users of financial statements, while staying within generally accepted accounting principles, international rulings, case law, corporate policy, banking needs, investor requirements, and tax legislation, he or she must think imaginatively and with great agility.

However it's a cerebral process so it's usually dismissed as either dull because few people grasp what it entails and even fewer people can understand the end product or it's considered unimportant (for the same reasons).

“Math should create something aesthetically pleasing?”

Rajaniemi wasn't limiting his definition of beauty to physical aesthetics, which is just as well because writers don’t produce anything of physical beauty, do they? He was talking about a cerebral beauty and that’s the nexus between math and writing fiction.

“Wow, this blows my mind. I know if you type the numbers 77345 into a calculator and then turn it upside down it spells out 'shell'. Is this what you're talking about? Cool.”

As usual, you make me smile! I’m waiting for your next book!!!

Maggie

[Allison]

Should anyone really question the relationship between math/science and creativity? I think it takes an enormous creativity for scientists to look for and discover new things. Would Einstein, Galileo, Darwin, and every other scientist who shaped history, been able to accomplish their findings without creativity?

[Maggie Bolitho]

And writers, before they can unleash their creativity, must be logical too as Francine Prose points out in her book Reading Like A Writer:

"What's strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature. Or possibly they worry that they will be distracted from their focus on art if they permit themselves to be sidetrcked by the dull requirements of English usage. But the truth is grammar is always interesting, always useful. Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought."

It's all yin and yang I guess. People whose lives are ostensibly creative engage mathematical skills to improve their art, just as mathematicians stretch their creativity to unravel their mysteries.