GoKawiilEssay maps how BM25's Stephen Robertson and Hokusai spent decades refining one core idea
A May 2026 blog post collects examples of people who spent decades iterating on a single idea before reaching their defining work. It traces Stephen Robertson's path from a 1976 probabilistic relevance paper with Karen Sparck Jones to the 1994 BM25 formula still used in search today, and cites Hokusai's decades of studying nature before painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa at 73.