Let’s take a trip to back to the 1700s.

To the limoncello & spaghetti-lined streets of Milan and the home of Maria Agnesi, a mathematician with various unrivalled claims to fame.

Agnesi was the first woman to ever write a maths handbook…

The first woman to be appointed as a university maths professor…

And the first woman to get a mention for her contribution to maths in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

She even has her own mathematical curve named after her (the so-called “Witch of Agnesi” curve).

Put this all together and it’s clear that Agnesi was a bona fide arithmetic O.G.

But Agnesi has a more curious claim to fame all to do with how she solved her maths problems.

See, Maria was in the habit of scribbling her equations on her blackboard. 

She’d leave these equations unsolved when she went to bed and weirdly wake up the next morning to find someone had written the solutions on the same blackboard.

Not only that but the solutions had been written in Agnesi’s own handwriting.

Intriguing.

So what was the cause of these curious incidents?

Well, turns out Agnesi was a sleep-walker. Some nights, she’d walk straight to her chalkboard, light a candle, grab some chalk, solve the equation on the blackboard and return to bed.

All while she was asleep!

So Agnesi solved her problems when she wasn’t trying to solve them. Not when she was.

I don’t know about you, but when it comes to low-maintenance problem solving, this method well and truly takes the biscuit.

And it points to a very useful idea:

What if the way to solve our problems wasn’t by thinking & analysing, then thinking & analysing harder when the initial brain-racking hasn’t worked?

What if, instead, the way to solve a problem was to think about that problem less and to turn the problem over to another part of us which has nothing to do with our brains?

Sure, the Agnesi story is an unusual example.

But it demonstrates a fundamental truth.

Often the way to solve a problem is by allowing the answer come through us, rather than trying to force the answer to come from us.

This is why “I’ll sleep on it” is one of my go-to problem-solving methods nowadays. I’m switching off my brain whether I like it or not.

And sure – I’m not literally taking Agnesi’s approach. I’m not stumbling round in my sleep, chalk in hand, scribbling drafts of daily emails on Fort Grundy's rocky ramparts. 

But it’s remarkable how often I’ll wake up after a good night’s sleep and a problem doesn’t look like a problem any more, or the solution to that problem has presented itself from nowhere.

It’s a low stress way to solve problems.

And it works.

It also happens to be a method we can hone and refine.

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