Discovery fiction
Discovery fiction is an exposition style in which the content is motivated by a fictitious story of how someone might have discovered the ideas being explained. The idea is mainly used in mathematics.
History
The term was coined by Michael Nielsen, and he may have independently come up with the idea.[1][2][3] (there are probably alternative terms too that might have come earlier)
But I think Tim Gowers also independently came up with the idea:
However, there is another way of justifying the introduction of a new concept into mathematics. Instead of looking at the actual history of that concept, one can look at a fictitious history. If you can tell a plausible story about why a concept might have been invented, then that is sufficient to make it seem reasonable. It solves the mystery of how anyone could have thought of the concept, and it also shows that it was pretty well inevitable that the concept would have been introduced sooner or later.[4]
Examples
- https://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/normal-subgroups-and-quotient-groups/
- https://michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rTC8MgPuYfXEw3WLp/discovery-fiction-for-the-pythagorean-theorem (see also here)
- From Ronald Solomon's Abstract Algebra: "The intention of this text is to emphasize the organic and historical development of the abstract theory of groups, rings, and fields from the substrate of high school mathematics. In Part I the 'history' is fictitious. It is only with imaginative hindsight that we can attribute the concept of a group of motions to Euclid. In the later parts, however, the history is genuine, although the notation and terminology is updated." (p. ix)