It seems he is the root of many creativity related research.
- Poincaré’s work habits have been compared to a bee flying from flower to flower.
- Poincaré himself was interested in the way his mind worked; he studied his habits and gave a talk about his observations in 1908 at the Institute of General Psychology in Paris. He linked his way of thinking to how he made several discoveries.
- The mathematician Darboux claimed he was un intuitif (intuitive), arguing that this is demonstrated by the fact that he worked so often by visual representation.
- He did not care about being rigorous and disliked logic.
- Poincaré himself wrote that he believed that logic was not a way to invent but a way to
structure ideas and that logic limits ideas. - “It is by logic we prove, but by intuition that we discover”.
- He never spent a long time on a problem since he believed that the subconscious would continue working on the problem while he consciously worked on another problem.
- In addition, Toulouse stated that most mathematicians worked from principles already established while Poincaré started from basic principles each time.
- Is Maths based on truth?
- He also believed that creativity involved a combination of ideas, but not just any random combination. The subconscious mind doesn’t combine ideas arbitrarily. Rather, it selects combinations that are meaningful or useful. Creativity thus involves not just random brainstorming but an intelligent selection of right combinations from all the possible ones.