What is creativity?
Posted on September 1st, 2007 by admin
What is creativity? Why should we care about it? Let’s start with this video.
Sir Ken Robinson believes that creativity will be [or now is] as important to our economic survival as literacy.
[…] It seems the time is right to work on a new creativity blog. You may be interested in looking at Sir Ken Robinson’s video on the […]
A wonderfully stirring call to arms reform our education systems, and the best laugh I’ve had in a long time.
Good luck with the new blog, Christopher!
Phil,
Thank you for your comment, and for the one on the slow site. I’m coining the term ‘h-value’ for humor quotient. While mathematicians aren’t immediately known for their humor, I’m sure there are some creative ones who are funny.
I’d like to investigate how humor and creativity are related. I wonder if there have been any attempts to quantify humor?
I read ‘Laughter’ by the philosopher, Henri Bergson. He was trying to ‘make sense’ of humor, but I’m not sure he succeeded. I’ll have to review it.
Robinson is such a human and a delight to listen to.
Christopher, is your h-value anything like the h-index? The h-index is a relatively new measure of an academic’s output, in which an h-index of N means that the academic has written at least N papers each of which has received at least N citations. This is a marginally better measure than simply “number of papers published”, since many poor papers will still yield a low h-index. I have elsewhere suggested a b-index for blogs: the number of posts with at least that many comments.
Anyway, try the pdf at http://www.ams.org/notices/200501/fea-dundes.pdf for an interesting take on mathematical humor.
Your b-index makes a lot of sense. I suggest it’s not so much the popularity of the blog that gives it its value. The web is a narrow place and defined by interest. The more narrowly that interest is defined, the more value it may have.
My wife complains about control-top pantyhose. If there were a blog about control-top pantyhose design, it may not get a lot of readers, but those who do read it will be more likely to have something to say about the subject. And, who knows, even come up with a better design.
But blogs have value aside from active participation. There are always more readers than writers. But for me, a high b-index would be where the level of discussion is of value, witty, or at least entertaining.
Thanks for the pdf. I have only taken a quick glance. Some of those jokes do require a specialized knowledge, which makes them all the more meaningful to those in the know.
The best thing I liked about mathematics in school was my beautiful teacher. She would be writing formulas on the blackboard. I always imagined what it would be like to run my hands through her long blond hair. Trying to solve the equation she was writing down was not really where my mind was. When I was a sixteen-year-old, I found it almost impossible to concentrate faced with such obstacles.
My h-value is yet to be defined. Any suggestions?
One interesting thing about a possible h-value for humor is that jokes tend to define an in-group and an out-group, as you noticed when reading the maths jokes. Suppose that a large h-value indicates a very funny joke. Then when the in-group is quite small, for those in the in-group the h-value of a given joke will be inversely proportional to the number of people who would “get it” (the size of the in-group), while for those in the out-group the h-value would be proportional to the size of the in-group. In other words, the smaller the in-group, the funnier the joke will be to those in it, while the less funny it will be to those outside it.
You mathematicians love to use words like ‘inversely proportional.’ Humor does seem to be limited to an in-group. But maybe it creates in-groups, too. I’ve seen the same theatrical productions in the UK and USA. Audiences laugh or ‘get’ (or don’t get) different things. I’ve watched a few British movies in American movie theaters and been the only person laughing my head off. It can be embarrassing.
Sometimes the in-group includes everyone. Who hasn’t had difficulty sleeping at some time or other? Here is my take on it.
[…] a symbol of our divided selves – “I’m” in my head – my belly is the enemy “other”. As Sir Ken Robinson says, some people think of the body as just transport for our giant heads. […]