ABSTRACT
Bolyai, John Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no human can hasten or retard.
Bruner, Jerome First, I should be clear about what the act of discovery entails. It is rarely on the frontier of knowledge or elsewhere, that new facts are “discovered” in the sense of being encountered, as Newton suggests, in the form of islands of truth in an uncharted sea of ignorance. Or if they appear to be discovered in this way, it is almost always thanks to some happy hypothesis about where to navigate. Discovery, just like surprise favors the well-prepared mind.
