## Messy calculations

I’ve been looking back at some of the mess I produced while trying to get an initial grip on the ideas I wrote up in my last two posts on negative probability. One of my main interests in this blog is the gulf between maths as it is formally written up and the weird informal processes that produce mathematical ideas in the first place, so I thought this might make a kind of mini case study. Apologies in advance for my handwriting.

I do all my work in cheap school-style exercise books. The main thread of what I’m thinking about goes front-to-back: that’s where anything reasonably well-defined that I’m trying to do will go. Working through lecture notes, doing exercises, any calculations where I’m reasonably clear on what I’m actually calculating. But if I have no idea what I’m even trying to do, it goes in the back, instead. The back has all kinds of scribbles and disorganised crap:

Most of it is no good, but new ideas also tend to come from the back. The Wigner function decomposition was definitely a back-of-the-book kind of thing. I’ve mostly forgotten what I was thinking when I made all these scribblings, and I wouldn’t trust the remembered version even if I had one, so I’ll try to refrain from too much analysis.

The idea seems to originate here:

This has the key idea already: start with equal probability for all squares, and then add on correction terms until the bottom left corner goes negative. But the numbers are complete bullshit! Looking back, I can’t make sense of them at all. For instance, I was trying to add $\frac{1}{8}$ to things, instead of $\frac{1}{4}$. Why? No idea! It’s not like $\frac{1}{8}$ is a number that had come up in any of my previous calculations, so I have no idea what I was thinking.

Even with the bullshit numbers, I must have had some inkling that this line of thought was worth pursuing, so I wrote it out again. This time I realised the numbers were wrong and crossed them out, writing the correct ones to the right:

The little squares above the main squares are presumably to tell me what to do: add $\frac{1}{4}$ to the filled in squares and subtract it from the blank ones.

I then did a sanity check on an example with no negative probabilities, and it worked:

At that point, I think I was convinced it worked in general, even though I’d only checked two cases. So I moved to the front of the book. After that, the rest of it looks like actual legit maths that a sane person would do, so it’s not so interesting. But I had to produce this mess to get there.