Mathematician as an artist

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Tomorrow, back to work.

It has been the first long holiday (2 weeks) in a long time. Among other things, I read the book "Someday is today" by the novelist and storyteller Matthew Dicks. I found it great. It is especially useful for creative people that do not manage to find the time (and strategy) to get things going. Dicks is a brave and generous guy: he goes out there and exposes his journey and vulnerabilities. I found him a true source of inspiration.

Reading "Someday is today" and "Storyworthy" (another book of his), I found quite a few analogies between being a researcher (in mathematics) and being an artist:

  1. Despair (of not knowing if you will make it or if you will be good enough):

    • Apparently, both Matthew Dicks and Stephen King (and others) had a moment of despair where they thought that they would never become novelists; nobody was going to buy their books. The same tends to happen in maths: PhD students (and post-docs) tend to go through a period of despair where they are unsure if they are fit for the job (or if they will get the tenured position). I remember during my research stay at the University of Maryland in 2014 going through this period of despair after having made a mistake; and later during my post-doc, when the job hunting was robbing me of the joy of living.

  2. Methodology to avoid (writers') mental block:

    • Dicks recommends having various projects running at the same time to avoid being blocked and to keep the motivation up. It is the same idea as Niklas Luhmann (sociologist and philosopher of social science - extremely prolific and inventor of the note-taking system named Zettelkasten):

"When I am stuck for one moment, I leave it and do something else. [...] With this method, to work on different things simultaneously, I never encounter any mental blockages." - Luhmann.

    • To foster ideas and the creation of new projects, it is key to take notes of all "little" ideas because they can be useful in the future (~ this is analogous to the "Homework for Life" by Matthew Dicks, where one records at the end of each day every event that is 'story-worthy').

  2. Goals vs. Horizons:

    • You know how a project starts, but not how it ends, so one must remain flexible and think more in terms of "horizon" rather than in goals.

  3. I can get no satisfaction:

    • Insatisfaction with one's own work is widely spread between artists and researchers. This leads to not celebrating much; just waiting for the "big thing" to happen to be allowed to celebrate. And most of the times, we do not get much recognition on the way.

    • Matthew Dicks recommends celebrating every little victory and keeping a record of every compliment that we receive: this way we get the necessary energy when the hard times come. He also recommends remembering our journey: how did we get where we are now; to appreciate all our efforts and the challenges we had to face.

  4. Prejudices on what it means to be a (good) writer/researcher in mathematics (seriously, there are so many, that I think one can write volumes, maybe I will devote other posts to this).


Doing research in mathematics is truly an art.

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