Toward a Mathematical Modeling of Creativity

“Creativity” is fascinating! We know so much about the topic without having the slightest idea what it is. We even know how to promote creative behavior by encouraging subjects to avoid strict adherence to rules, to explore new explanations or paradigms, to welcome novelty, to transform a problem into a different framework, to generalize through abstraction, to brainstorm, and to explore options before making evaluations. But, other than knowing that these approaches tend to work (sufficiently well so that some are “corporate brainstorming strategies” while others are tried in the classroom), we really don’t know why. The “why” becomes an important issue. Also, all these different approaches emphasize “generality” over details. What explains this commonality?