One of my fellow grad students shared a paper with me that turned out to be a great read. It was Professor Freeman Dyson’s article titled Birds and Frogs, that was the invited Einstein lecture at the American Mathematical Society. Dyson talks about two categories of mathematicians (researchers) – birds, and frogs. While birds soar high, and get a view of the entire landscape, frogs tread tread deep, looking for details. Dyson argues how both kinds are equally important for mathematics in particular, and science in general. He does not make a case for either being superior to the other, merely pointing out the differences between the research approach of the two.
The article is a historical walk through the development of mathematics since scientific revolution in the 17th century. Dyson names two important contributors: Francis Bacon, whom he calls a frog, and René Descartes, who is a bird. It is argued that Bacon advises scientists to “travel over the earth collecting facts”, and the end of the process of collecting facts, natural phenomena reveal themselves; purely a process of practice. Descartes, on the other hand, advises scientists to keep eyes fixed on the facts of nature; purely a process of thought. Over the years, neither Cartesian dogmatism, nor Baconian empirisism has unraveled natural mysteries on its own. However, Dyson argues this laid a school of thought in the respective countries of Bacon and Descartes. Pascal, Rutherford and Darwin – all Baconian, therefore frogs, while Pascal, Laplace and Poincaré – all Cartesian, therefore birds.
Dyson presents this wonderful bifurcation in scientific thought process all the way from Schrödinger to his adviser Abram Besicovitch to Hermann Weyl to von Neumann. The key idea of the article is very clear: birds are very much necessary to carry out interdisciplinary, “grand-unification”-esque research, while frogs are at the vanguards of specific areas, pushing the boundaries ever so slightly, but firmly.
One of the things that I realized was, most of the research collaboration issues could be attributed to collaborators belonging to different species! Dyson provides his own example of how he was moulded into being a frog by his adviser Besicovitch, who was also a frog. But when collaborating with Hermann Weyl, whom Dyson says to be a prototypical bird, their efforts were not very fruitful.
So, when struggling in scientific collaborations, it could be worth reading Dyson’s article and identifying which category one belongs to, and and how it compares across your group. :)