The Serendipity Equations

Abstract

In spite of the role it recognizably plays in sparking innovation, serendipity, the faculty of making fortunate and unexpected discoveries by accident, remains largely unexplored as a subject of research. This may result to some extent from the difficulty in discriminating serendipity from other manifestations of creativity. To overcome this barrier, we propose a notation that visually expresses serendipity in the form of logical equations, offering a different way of looking at the concept.