Serendipity
The foot on the step
Serendipity · 1881, told 1908 · Coutances, an omnibus
Coutances
He had already worked. Then he stopped. Then the step.
Poincaré writes that he had been struggling. He went to Coutances. He boarded an omnibus. At the moment his foot touched the step, the idea came. He had no time to verify it until the ride was over. He later treated this as a fact about unconscious work, not about fate.
A pause is not a prophecy.
Concordance
- The thing
- A mathematical insight arriving as Poincaré boarded an omnibus, after incubation.
- Seen
- He puts his foot on the step. The Fuchsian functions, he says, were there.
- Sourced
- Henri Poincaré, Science et méthode (1908). English: Science and Method.
- Miss
- We have his memory of the step, written decades later. Not a notebook timed to the minute.
- One question remains
- What kind of arrival is an idea that comes when you are not hunting it?
