2 posts tagged “math”
What was your most memorable or favorite school field trip?
I was good at math in high school (no longer true) and scored high enough on the state math competition to get invited to be on the Michigan state math team. That trip involved taking a Greyhound from the UP down to Midland and then flying to New York for the competition. It was fun in a very geeky way to be around a bunch of really smart math people.
This was back in the day when an unaccompanied minor could go 8+ hours on a Greyhound and not have it be any second thought.
The actual competition was not all that memorable - the team didn't win - but I do recall the slogan that made sure that we weren't in last place: "Remember Delaware B".
How To Solve It by George Polya is a book on heuristics, the technique and method for getting closer to the solution of a problem. It's disguised as a book on mathematics, and generally all of the examples are given as math problems to solve, but if you hold the text sideways and squint you can see some patterns that can be reused in other parts of your life.
The last time I did a full-on job search I used How To Solve It as the organizing principle. Polya starts you out with a nicely organized list of questions to ask about problems - "have I seen this problem before" the first and most obvious one - and there's some relentless pursuit of all angles of attack that it encourages.
If you ever lived through doing math proofs wondering just why you were working down a particular line of reasoning, Polya is great - he's not afraid to work backwards from a possible solution to see how the line of logic or reasoning might go, and thus reconstruct an approach based on a presumed (or desired) outcome.
