Proceedings are available partially as Open Access via IDEALS.

The paper of the blog owner “Wilhelm Ostwald’s Combinatorics as a Link between In-formation and Form” is also published in this issue and can be read, generously allowed by the publisher, open access at the TUHH institutional repository.

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The article is available at the personal website of Roald Hoffmann who contains some further interesting articles on art or poetry and science, teaching and research, e.g.:

• Thoughts on Aesthetics and Visualization In Chemistry, Hyle 9(1), 7-10 (2003)
• Under the Surface of the Chemical Article, Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed., 27, 1593-1602 (1988)

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See also Catarina Caetano da Rosa’s German paper with the title “Bibliotheken von Babel: Wunsch- und Albtraum des unendlichen Wissensraumes (Libraries of Babel: great dream and nightmare of the infinite knowledge space)” at the Workshop called “Architekturen der digitalen Weltbibliothek aus historischer und aktueller Perspektive (Architectures of the digital world library from a historical and actual view)” at a computer sciences conference in Germany in 2007 (37. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI)).

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The post Tool for Creative Combinatorics first appeared on Creative Combinatorics.

Creative combinatorics is the subject of this blog as well as this blog is a way to explore this subject through creative combinatorics. So feel free to browse through using the categories or tags on the right or use the contents page which gives a short systematic overview.

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Many people view arts and sciences as being different because sciences yield objective answers to problems whereas arts produce subjective experiences I argue that art and science are on a continuum in which artists work with possible worlds whereas scientists are constrained to working in this world. But sometimes perceiving this world differently is the key to making discoveries. Thus, arts and sciences are on a continuum in which artistic thinking produces possibilities that scientists can evaluate for efficacy here and now. Not surprisingly, then, many of the most innovative scientists have had avocations in the arts, and some of the most innovative artists have had avocations in the sciences. These polymaths have often written or spoken about how their arts involvments have benefitted their scientific creativity and may provide a model for fostering a more innovative education.

Robert Root-Bernstein: The art of innovation: polymthas and universality of the creative process, in: Larisa V. Shavinia (Ed.): The International Handbook of Innovation. Oxford: Elsevier, 2003. PP. 267-278.

He argues that “artistic scientists and engineers have more image-ination, musically talented
ones duet (do it) better, and the verbally inclined have the skills to become pundits. Seriously.” (p. 270), and cited (on p. 268) Ostwald who “produced a large body of work on scientific genius that validated the polymath hypothesis”.

This supported by J. Rogers Hollingsworth who argued that:

the wider the range of experience and knowledge of the scientist, the more fields of science his/her work are likely to influence and the greater the importance with which it will be perceived. (p. 140)

J. Rogers Hollingsworth, “High Cognitive Complexity and the Making of Major Scientific Discoveries,” in Arnaud Sales and Marcel Fournier, eds., Knowledge, Communication and Creativity. (London and Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2007). pp. 129-155.

Ostwald is mentioned here in a table of “Twentieth-century scientists who made major discoveries and were also quite active in music, art, writing, crafts and politics” (pp. 142-144)

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One example is the work of Dean Keith Simonton:

• Presentation with the title Scientific creativity as a combinatorial process: The chance baseline. (“Milieus of Creativity” symposium at Villa Bosch Studio, Heidelberg, 2006.
• Paper with the title “Scientific creativity as constrained stochastic behavior: the integration of product, person, and process perspectives.” Psychological Bulletin 129(2003) 4, 475-94

The post Scientific creativity as a combinatorial process first appeared on Creative Combinatorics.

There is a science, the Theory of Combinations, which gives the rules by which, in given elements or characteristics, the kind and number of the possible groups can be found. The theory of combinations enables us to obtain a complete table and survey of all possible complex conceptswhich can be formed from given simple ones (whether they be really elementary concepts, or only relatively so) . When in any field of science the fundamental concepts have been combined in this manner, a complete survey can be had of all the possible parts of this science by means of the theory of combinations (p.71).

Thus combinatory schematization serves not only to bring the existing content of science into such order that each single thing has its assigned place, but the groups which have thereby been found to be vacant, to which as yet nothing of experience corresponds, also point to the places in which science can be completed by new discoveries (p.73).

The post Creative Combinatorics in Ostwald's philosophy first appeared on Creative Combinatorics.

Taken from his chemical experience, Ostwald’s method of scholar­ly research can be descri­bed as: Defining the problem (1), exploring the problem by going back to the basic concepts of it (2) and combining these basic concepts in a combinatorical way to explain the diversity of the complex world (3). The diverse objects created through combination had to be held together by a holistic framework (4) like Ostwald’s monistic world view and scientistic energetism.

• Wilhelm Ostwald, Moderne Naturphilosophie. I. Die Ordnungswissenschaften (Leipzig 1914).

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