Tribute to Yair Aharoni

A theme in the body of work of the late Yair Aharoni is that you should not believe what you read. Yair’s academic life was a demonstration of this, and of how much we need to keep this in mind, for the vitality of our subject field. One of the aspects of great research that is generally lost to posterity is how the researcher came to develop his or her thinking. In the case of scientific research, you could say “Why is it important, the science is the science?” That may be true if we are talking about the textbook account. But the textbook is not a blueprint, and it is certainly no inspiration to new generations of researchers. New researchers are the ones about whom I worry. The foreshortened distillations of literature encourage them only to aspire to make their contribution to where the gaps appear (or where they are told the gaps are). But that misses the point. The point is that the received account is almost certainly wrong…