Atulpant's List: ideonomy

• Invention has its own algorithm: genius, obsession, serendipity, and epiphany in some unknowable combination.
• This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common
• Jason Bardi writes in “The Calculus Wars,” a history of the idea’s development.

• “If Newton and Leibniz had not discovered it, someone else would have.” Calculus was in the air.

   
• Merton’s observation about scientific geniuses is clearly not true of artistic geniuses, however. You can’t pool the talents of a dozen Salieris and get Mozart’s Requiem. You can’t put together a committee of really talented art students and get Matisse’s “La Danse.” A work of artistic genius is singular
• our persistent inability to come to terms with the existence of multiples are the result of our misplaced desire to impose the paradigm of artistic invention on a world where it doesn’t belong.

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