Only making Good mistakes helps :-)

After my last blog entry about the risks relating to juggling to much uncertaintly I stumbled upon ^Z's 1999 entry about making “Good Mistakes“.  I think that there's something profound in there - for me especially!  Thanks for that Mark :-)

Taken from : http://zhurnal.net/ww/zw?GoodMistakes

Mathematician Goro Shimura, speaking of Yukata Tamayana (1927-1958) said:

"He was gifted with the special capability of making many mistakes, mostly in the right direction. I envied him for this and tried in vain to imitate him, but found it quite difficult to make good mistakes."

as quoted by Simon Singh in Fermat's Enigma. The challenge, as Shimura notes, is to make "good mistakes", and to learn to differentiate them from unproductive blunders.

In the same vein, Amir Azcel's Fermat's Last Theorem quotes Andrew Wiles:

"Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. You go into the first room and it's dark, completely dark. You stumble around, bumping into the furniture. Gradually, you learn where each piece of furniture is. And finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch and turn it on. Suddenly, it's all illuminated and you can see exactly where you were. Then you enter the next dark room ..."

That's life: a succession of dark chambers. Learning experiences, if taken rightly.