来源：《卫报》
原文刊登日期：2022年7月8日
June Huh, an unfulfilled poet who says he struggles to do more than three hours’ focused work a day, this week became one of the latest recipients of the highest honour in mathematics, the Fields medal. Rarely can a single sentence have contained so many apparent cultural contradictions. Maths is traditionally seen as a “hard” subject, requiring sustained concentration and regular practice.
不成功的诗人许埈珥说，他每天很难集中精力工作超过三个小时。本周，他成为数学最高荣誉菲尔兹奖的最新获得者之一。一句话很难包含这么多明显的文化矛盾。数学传统上被认为是一门“难”的学科，需要持续的专注和经常的练习。
Prof Huh’s approach is different. For a few months in 2019, the Princeton academic revealed, all he did was reread books from his youth, including the novels of the Swiss-German polymath Hermann Hesse, guru of the hippy-era search for authenticity. He emphasised the parallels between artists and mathematicians, saying that, in both cases, “it feels like you’re grabbing something that’s already there, rather than creating something in your mind”.
许教授的方法与众不同。这位普林斯顿大学的学者透露，在2019年的几个月里，他所做的就是重读自己年轻时读过的书，包括瑞士-德国博学家赫尔曼·黑塞的小说，他是嬉皮士时代寻求真实性的大师。他强调了艺术家和数学家之间的相似之处，他说，在这两种角色里，“感觉你是在抓住已经存在的东西，而不是在你的脑海中创造东西”。
Prof Huh is clearly one of a kind, yet his career and approach raise interesting questions for all of us. Most obviously, they challenge the two-cultures binary – the “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between science and the arts – which was hotly debated even when it was first proposed by CP Snow in 1959.
许教授显然是独一无二的，但他的职业生涯和方法为我们所有人提出了有趣的问题。最明显的是，这些问题挑战了两种文化的二元对立——科学和艺术之间的“相互不理解的鸿沟”——这一观点在1959年首次由查尔斯·珀西·斯诺提出时就引起了激烈的争论。
More interestingly, in stressing the importance to his thinking of interactions with his environment – walking in the woods near his campus, for instance – Prof Huh challenges received ideas not only about how work is best achieved but even what it is. He is good at “finding stuff”, he said. What he finds, he puts together in unprecedented ways.
更有趣的是，在强调他对与环境互动的思考的重要性时——例如，在校园附近的树林里散步——许教授挑战了广为接受的观点，不仅关于如何最好地完成工作，甚至关于什么是工作。他说自己很擅长“找东西”。他以前所未有的方式将他的发现整合在一起。
This is an embodied metaphor for the process that makes him such an original thinker. It connects with an influential article published in 1998 by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers. In The Extended Mind, they argued that the environment had an active role in driving cognitive processes, though their concept of environment included notepads, calculators or a group of people brainstorming around a table.
这是对使他成为如此具有独创性的思想家的过程的一个具身隐喻。它与哲学家安迪·克拉克和大卫·查默斯在1998年发表的一篇有影响力的文章有关。在《拓展思维》一书中，他们认为环境在驱动认知过程中发挥着积极作用，尽管他们对环境的概念包括记事本、计算器或一群人围坐在桌子旁进行头脑风暴。
The point – picked up in a recent book by the American science writer Annie Murphy – is that the human brain does not work in isolation. Moreover, it has not evolved to work in straight lines but in loops that actively engage its surroundings, including a body that is constantly feeding back sensory information: the cold sweat of fear, the prickle of excitement. The structures commonly associated with productivity may even hamper thought: rather than putting in long hours at a desk, it might be more efficient to take a walk in the woods or even have a snooze.
美国科学作家安妮•墨菲在最近出版的一本书中提到，人脑并不是孤立运作的。此外，它还没有进化到以直线方式工作，而是主动与周围环境互动的循环，包括一个不断反馈感官信息的身体：恐惧的冷汗，兴奋的刺痛。通常与生产效率相关的结构甚至可能会妨碍思考：与其在办公桌前工作很长时间，到树林里散步或甚至打个盹可能会更有效率。
This sort of thinking, so heretical to the instrumentalism of capitalist societies, loops back to the wisdom of poets. “Inspiration is as necessary in geometry as it is in poetry,” wrote Alexander Pushkin. The mistake, now as then, is to see inspiration, or imagination, as a luxury. It isn’t – it’s essential.
这种思维，对于资本主义社会的工具主义是如此异端，却又回到了诗人的智慧。“灵感在几何学中和在诗歌中一样重要，”亚历山大·普希金写道。现在和那时一样，错误在于将灵感或想象力视为一种奢侈品。灵感不是奢侈品——灵感是必不可少的。