Does intuition play an important role in the field of mathematics? The essay seems to suggest that mathematicians use their intuition a great deal. Terence Tao seems to agree that it is important:
...“fuzzier” or “intuitive” thinking (such as heuristic reasoning, judicious extrapolation from examples, or analogies with other contexts such as physics) gets deprecated as “non-rigorous”. All too often, one ends up discarding one’s initial intuition and is only able to process mathematics at a formal level, thus getting stalled at the second stage of one’s mathematical education.
The point of rigour is not to destroy all intuition; instead, it should be used to destroy bad intuition while clarifying and elevating good intuition. It is only with a combination of both rigorous formalism and good intuition that one can tackle complex mathematical problems;
Intuition is vital. Theorems can take paragraphs and proofs can go for pages; without intuition, the combinatorics would annihilate you. Interestingly, I'm starting to develop new intuitions (in logic, rather than my old field, differential geometry) which means I might soonbe able to do some work in the field.
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