Category: life

G. Polya, How to Solve It

 Summary taken from G. Polya, "How to Solve It", 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1957, ISBN 0-691-08097-6.

  1. UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
    • First. You have to understand the problem.
    • What is the unknown? What are the data? What is the condition?
    • Is it possible to satisfy the condition? Is the condition sufficient to determine the unknown? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?
    • Draw a figure. Introduce suitable notation.
    • Separate the various parts of the condition. Can you write them down?
  2. DEVISING A PLAN
    • Second. Find the connection between the data and the unknown. You may be obliged to consider auxiliary problems if an immediate connection cannot be found. You should obtain eventually a plan of the solution.
    • Have you seen it before? Or have you seen the same problem in a slightly different form?
    • Do you know a related problem? Do you know a theorem that could be useful?
    • Look at the unknown! And try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown.
    • Here is a problem related to yours and solved before. Could you use it? Could you use its result? Could you use its method? Should you introduce some auxiliary element in order to make its use possible?
    • Could you restate the problem? Could you restate it still differently? Go back to definitions.
    • If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem? Keep only a part of the condition, drop the other part; how far is the unknown then determined, how can it vary? Could you derive something useful from the data? Could you think of other data appropriate to determine the unknown? Could you change the unknown or data, or both if necessary, so that the new unknown and the new data are nearer to each other?
    • Did you use all the data? Did you use the whole condition? Have you taken into account all essential notions involved in the problem?
  3. CARRYING OUT THE PLAN
    • Third. Carry out your plan.
    • Carrying out your plan of the solution, check each step. Can you see clearly that the step is correct? Can you prove that it is correct?
  4. Looking Back
    • Fourth. Examine the solution obtained.
    • Can you check the result? Can you check the argument?
    • Can you derive the solution differently? Can you see it at a glance?
    • Can you use the result, or the method, for some other problem?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

http://msk.treko.ru/show_article_947

Quotes

жизнь как туалетная бумага-вроде длинная, а тратишь на всякое говно!!!)))
всегда знай,что сказать, но не всегда говори,что знаешь!
когда будешь подниматься наверх, ты узнаешь много разных людей-не обижай их, потому что встретишься с ними еще раз-когда будешь лететь вниз!
жизнь цениться не за длину, а за содержание!
тот, кто владеет собой – владеет миром!
язык дан человеку для того, чтобы скрывать свои мысли!
мстят только слабые – сильные могут простить!
следуй своей дорогой – пусть люди говорят, что угодно!!!
нет ничего невозможного!

Procrastinating

 
Smart scheduling can also thwart procrastination. In an experiment published in 2002 Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and marketing professor Klaus Wertenbroch of INSEAD, a business school with campuses in France and Singapore, asked students in an executive-education class to set their own deadlines for the three papers due that semester. Ariely and Wertenbroch set penalties for papers turned in after the self-imposed deadlines. Despite the penalties, 70 percent of the students chose deadlines spaced out over the semester, rather than clustering them all at the end. What is more, those who set the early deadlines scored better, on average, than did students in a comparable class in which Ariely set one due date for all three papers at the end of the semester. Such planning can buck any inclination to put off the work. “The deadlines made them better performers,” Ariely says.

More simply, Pychyl advises procrastinators to “just get started.” The anticipation of the task often is far worse than the task turns out to be. To demonstrate this fact, his group, in work that appeared in 2000, gave 45 students pagers and checked in with the volunteers 40 times over five days to query them about their moods and how often they were putting off a task that had a deadline. “We found that when students actually do the task they are avoiding, their perceptions of the task change significantly. Many times, they actually enjoyed it.”

In Raymond’s case, getting to the task was, indeed, the hard part. Knaus helped him to do that by first determining the reason for his instinct to delay: Raymond feared being tested on the synopsis and looking foolish. So Knaus asked him to pick the lesser of two evils, doing his work—and risking imperfection—or avoiding difficult tasks and losing his job. When Knaus put it that way, the lawyer was able to “just grind it out.” Instead of being fired, Raymond became a “superstar” at his firm.

Note: This article was originally published with the title, "I’ll Do It Tomorrow".

‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

link

перевод

video