While it is always wrong to make absolute declarations and sweeping generalizations, it is undeniable that there are three types of people in the world:
1. Those who are good at math, and
B. Those of us who aren’t.
The easy conclusion is that people who are good at math are organized, logical thinkers. This may be true—the old left-brain/right-brain thing. I can never remember which is which. That may mean I am the third of the two types. However, I think there is a reason the people who are not good at math tend to be the more creative types—artists, writers, thespians, short-order cooks.
The very simple and obvious explanation is that we had to think up reasons we did not have our math assignments ready to turn in. This forced us to turn on our creative juices to move beyond the old trope of “the dog ate it” to the more entertaining (if no more credible) mitigation of epic singularities such as alien abductions, evil twins, foul play, espionage, talking rabbits who are late for parties, and inter-dimensional portals opened by the magnificent correctness of a formula you calculated (which sadly resulted in its theft by miscreants from another galaxy). Continue reading “The Fountainhead of Creativity”