Explaining Boris Pasternak\u27s Observation that Complex Ideas Are Sometimes Easier to Understand

Probably the most cited lines from the poetry of the Nobel-prize winning Russian writer Boris Pasternak contain the observation that complex ideas are sometimes easier to understand than simpler ones. This is not just a paradoxical poetic statement: many teachers have observed the same seemingly counter-intuitive phenomenon. In this paper, we provide a possible explanation for this phenomenon, by showing that indeed, many easier-to-describe mathematical models lead to more-difficult-to-solve mathematical problems