A while back I read an interview with the mathematician Conway where he said something that I regularly think of.
To be a great mathematician, you have to be comfortable with something not being finished, not knowing when it'll be finished or whether it'll ever be finished (by you). You might work on a proof for years, not knowing whether you'll actually solve it.
Whenever I have anxiety around some unfinished project at work, I think of this quote. I'm not a mathematician, but we can all learn to accept ambiguity and incompleteness.
I'm fact, the mathematician Gödel, showed that every conceivable mathematical framework is incomplete, because it contains unprovable statements.
JC Brand
npub1pu…lnndd
2023-09-04 09:34:55
Author Public Key
npub1purzvv7zzxqymk9q53qmjvlvlrwhy4dsyjt77nxjym9m77e62wtsnlnnddPublished at
2023-09-04 09:34:55Event JSON
{
"id": "23e74016d804e83eadadddeb81a2dd3445fcd12c36f5fabf14f8dd3360e826fb",
"pubkey": "0f062633c211804dd8a0a441b933ecf8dd7255b02497ef4cd226cbbf7b3a5397",
"created_at": 1693820095,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [],
"content": "A while back I read an interview with the mathematician Conway where he said something that I regularly think of.\n\nTo be a great mathematician, you have to be comfortable with something not being finished, not knowing when it'll be finished or whether it'll ever be finished (by you). You might work on a proof for years, not knowing whether you'll actually solve it.\n\nWhenever I have anxiety around some unfinished project at work, I think of this quote. I'm not a mathematician, but we can all learn to accept ambiguity and incompleteness.\n\nI'm fact, the mathematician Gödel, showed that every conceivable mathematical framework is incomplete, because it contains unprovable statements.",
"sig": "81e132e2b536f2ad1f0fa215a3bab0821bb850611f2b2c25a62ba695296510e56ad5d1a141cd6774f3d097e05eb579967fe97cca65c9d047639f78684bee948e"
}