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"Coffee Mates: An artist and a mathematician share a `readymade' brew," by Rhonda Roland Shearer. The Sciences, March/April 1997, pages 14-15.
This article, written by an artist with an interest in mathematics, describes intriguing parallels between ideas of the mathematician Henri Poincar\'e and the work of the artist Marcel Duchamp. In a popular essay published in 1908, Poincar\'e analyzed his creative processes when he made a certain mathematical discovery. He spoke of allowing his ``unconscious'' mind to produce many different ideas from which his ``conscious'' mind would select. Duchamp created many works which he called ``readymades''---displays of everyday objects such as a bicycle wheel, a snow shovel, or a hat rack. The article suggests that, influenced by Poincar\'e's analysis of creativity, Duchamp saw his readymades as a selection of objects from the unconscious mind of society.
