Maths

Believe it or not, my recent bedtime reading is How to Solve Mathematical Problems by Wayne Wickelgren.

It sounds amazing, eh ? However, my glory would dime down if you know the title of its previous version: How to Solve Problems - Elements of a Theory of Problems and Problem Solving. The author was a professor of psychology at MIT.

Yes, the pages are full of difficult mathematical formula - which I was completely at a lost by the final one-third of the book. Nonetheless, the techniques are generic ones, and could equally be applied to non-mathematical problems. In short, Wickelgren described the component of problems, and outlined six general methods to solve them:

1. inference
2. use sub-goals and action sequence
3. method of hill climbing
4. method of contradiction
5. method of special example
   
6. working backward

More importantly, the author also showed how to choose the appropriate method by analyzing the type of the problem.

It is always a pleasure to learn something that is entirely useless.