Topic summary

Creative process

Creative process

Extracted from the Wikipedia article Creativity.

Modern

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading mathematicians and scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz (1896) and Henri Poincaré (1908) began to reflect on and publicly discuss their creative processes. The insights of Poincaré and von Helmholtz inspired the accounts of the creative process by pioneering theorists such as Graham Wallas and Max Wertheimer. In his work Art of Thought, published in 1926, Wallas presented one of the first models of the creative process. In the Wallas model, creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of five stages: