How To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method

I didn't buy this book for the math — I bought it for how the author explains how to approach and solve problems. Even though he explains the process in math terms, his insight on problem solving technique applies to anything. High, HIGHLY recommended for anyone who wants to sharpen their analysis and problem solving skills!

About 99% of this book can be read on just the back front cover and the appendix. The book can apply to real-life outside math. My only improvement for the book is shorter chapters for some of the concepts for easy finding.

Polya prescribes different forms to approaching a problem through some guide questions that a solver should ask ("Is there a related problem"). The exposition is quite short, majority of the book is devoted to a glossary of heuristic terms which prove very helpful. Polya uses common problems in high school geometry to demonstrate his point which make it easily understandable. I'm glad I have discovered an excellent book on problem solving which would prove indispensable in my programming career. Other programming books mainly demonstrate features of an OS or a computer language but this book goes into the heart of the computer science which is problem solving.

the book describes the very basic thing that we are going to do daily which is to solve the problem. It's way is simple but fundamental, and it emphasis it again and again. It greatly helped my thinking process and would serve the basic onto other books targeting at problem solving.

This book is a gentle introduction to heuristic reasoning. It will very useful to mathematicians, physists, and engineering students, as well as professors in making. I found this book instructive in learning how to identify a problem to find and a problem to solve (you will see the difference).

I'd like this book, and very interesting for reading. It has two parts. One is the problem solving methodology itself with an excellent detail and options in every step. And another related for math problems. As IT professional, it is useful for common issues, algorithm design , design alternatives. The chapters related to the methodology should be included in any course of algorithm design.

A lot of books have been written about logic. This is not a logic book. YAY Polya wrote a two-volume work called Induction and Analogy in Mathematics, which is about the use of induction-- hunches, intuition, smart guessing. I liked that so much that I found How to Solve it. Between them all, I see a real opportunity to improve the sharpness of one's thinking.

Good content, but reading it in the Kindle app for iPad is almost impossible. Holding the iPad in portrait orientation produces text in landscape layout; holding it in landscape orientation produces a portrait text layout. As I have no issue with dozens of other Kindle edition books read on my iPad, I attribute this to the book being ~66 years old and so probably scanned into Kindle. Very poorly done IMHO.

Wouldn't stop me from buying the book, but I'd definitely try to find a better quality print run, or find a higher quality second hand version. If this was a gift for someone else, I'd be very angry.

Great book but too advanced for my understanding.