Reaching for the Extreme with Ian Stewart

So I'm curious, what inspired the book for you?

Well, I think problems come, mathematical problems come from the real world, so-called, from the natural world.

In the past, enormous important things have happened because somebody looked at a snowflake and thought, "Why do they look like that?" Or threw a pebble in a pond and watched the ripples.

And sometimes the, the other extreme, mathematical ideas come because some mathematician's sitting there not really thinking about anything very much and suddenly think, "Oh, now, what about, you know, um, you know, I- there, there's a, a whole bunch of ideas I've been thinking about, and I've just noticed there's a kind of gap in the middle of them all.

There's a hole that needs to be filled.

There's some obvious questions that ought to be asked." And, uh, uh, and then that starts them off.

And of course, historically what happens is you get those two influences.

It's a bit like a tennis match.

The idea gets batted to and fro between the real world and the world of the mathematician's imagination.

So I think, uh, but it, it, in some ways it's a very mysterious process.

I mean, uh, over my career I've written more than 200 research papers, often with various people, and these have arisen from almost any kind of inspiration.

It's a chatting over coffee at some point with somebody that you haven't actually met before, or there, there's an obvious problem that everybody knows about and you think it's about time you should do something about this stupid thing that nobody understands.

So the whole history of mathematics is full of problems that knock around for hundreds of years and problems that people think up and solve within the next 10 minutes.