Jason Forrest shares a comprehensive article based on insights drawn from a math book and explains how the findings can be applied to problem solving and design thinking.
I’m so smitten with learning that I fear I may be addicted to it. Imagine my delight when I learned about How To Solve It – a book about the very nature of learning how to solve problems. Written in 1945 by noted Hungarian mathematician George Pólya, How To Solve It is a book written for math students on how to solve math problems, but it was equally written for math teachers on how to teach them to do so.
How To Solve It is not just a book about math but is actually a book about how to solve problems – any problems – and it became the foundation for the field of heuristics. Based on Polya’s prodigious knowledge and historic research, the book has a curious structure, with several introductions to the book, an outline of his four-step framework for solving problems, and then a dictionary of heuristics: which is actually an explanation of 67 different concepts to aid in solving problems.
For a math book, its is a joy to read. Polya’s voice is funny, knowing, and sincere. You can tell he spent years in the classroom coaching students of all kinds, and while the book is absolutely about math, it is equally universal, as he said in the late 1960s: “I believe the most important part of thinking that is developed in mathematics is the right attitude in tackling and solving problems. We have problems in everyday life. We have problems in science. We have problems in politics. We have problems everywhere. The right attitude for problem solving may be slightly different from one domain to another, but we have only one head, and therefore it is natural that there should be one general set of tactics to tackling all kinds of problems. My personal opinion is that the main point in mathematics teaching is to develop these tactics of problem solving.”
For the majority of the book Polya teaches his process by solving geometry examples or finding patterns in number sequences but often switches it up using non-math examples applying the same heuristic for solving a crossword puzzle or understanding ancient Egyptian engineering. It’s here that How to Solve It really comes into its own, as Polya’s method results in a series of questions that can be applied to almost any problem.
Key points include:
- Data visualization
- The communications objective
- Polya’s heuristic process
Read the full article, How to Solve It – and by It – I Mean *Anything*, on Nightingalevds.com