How to Solve It  (English, Paperback, Polya George)

An eminent mathematician’s bestselling book, How To Solve It: A New Aspect Of Mathematical Method, is a virtuous offering for anyone in the field of mathematics as it engages simple yet consolidated mathematical strategies to solve complex problems.

Summary Of The Book

How To Solve It: A New Aspect Of Mathematical Method engages readers because of its succinct prose and appealing structure in terms of the illuminating expose it provides for anyone involved with mathematics. Polya simply discloses to readers the universality of reasoning out the unknowns or tackling the proof that is the heart to solving a complex mathematical problem. He implores the importance of tackling the problem by forgoing irrelevancies and forging a clear path to the solution.

This book has been popular for many decades for its ingenuity and the propagation of heuristics, which is the science behind innovation. The book is divided into four sections whereby the problem is explored through the stages of understanding, the plan for the solution, this plan’s execution and finally the reexamination to aid in future quests of problem solving.

The book engages dialogues where Polya discusses his theories with a student for every problem explored in the book, which is a trick employed by Polya to engage the readership of the students. There are additional topics deftly maneuvered by the author where he engages the use of heuristics to provide references for specific aspects of solving a problem that include the use of analogy, auxiliary elements, different derivations to tackle familiar problems and recombining problems to induce the notion of inductive logic. Polya rewards progress by allowing for checks that are presented in this section to encourage the growth of abilities related to cracking the codes in mathematics.

Since the book is primed for use in academics, it therefore involves a number of hints and sample problems to test the knowledge of the reader before dropping them into the world Polya creates. The learning process is of special importance and he devises an interactive approach to increase the participation of both students and teachers.

How To Solve It: A New Aspect Of Mathematical Method was first published in 1945 and was primarily written for teachers involved in helping students solve difficult problems. It soon grew into a bestseller and has been in print ever since its release. It has been translated into 23 different languages and is a standard text for anyone enthusiastic about the field of mathematics.

About George Polya 

George Polya was an influential Hungarian Jewish Mathematician of the twentieth century. His involvement in mathematics extended to the literary domain and he has written four books on the subject. They include Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning and Patterns of Plausible Inference.

Polya was born in 1887 in Budapest. He worked as a Professor of Mathematics in ETH Zurich and then at Stanford University as an Emeritus Professor. He received many awards for his contributions such as the one given by SIAM, which honors his dedication to combinatorial theory. He had made seminal contributions to the number theory, combinatorics and numerical analysis, among other branches of mathematics. He died in California in 1985 at the age of 97.