Quotes About Problem-solving

Engineering is the art or science of making practical.

A designer must always think about the unfortunate production engineer who will have to manufacture what you have designed; try to understand his problems.

Computer Science is a science of abstraction -creating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it.

Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.

They think they can make fuel from horse manure - now, I don't know if your car will be able to get 30 miles to the gallon, but it's sure gonna put a stop to siphoning.

I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.

Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.

At a given instant everything the surgeon knows suddenly becomes important to the solution of the problem. You can't do it an hour later, or tomorrow. Nor can you go to the library and look it up.

It is sometimes easier to circumvent prevailing difficulties [in science] rather than to attack them.

When the difficulty of a problem lies only in finding out what follows from certain fixed premises, mathematical methods furnish invaluable wings for flying over intermediate obstructions.

The central activity of engineering, as distinguished from science, is the design of new devices, processes and systems.

The secret of science is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything else that marks the man of genius in the scientific world.

Mathematics is the summit of human thinking. It has all the creativity and imagination that you can find in all kinds of art, but unlike art-charlatans and all kinds of quacks will not succeed there.

I like talking to engineers best. They built bridges, they're very precise, very disciplined, yet I find they have roving minds.

It is better to do the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way.

The Method of Bisection is a sophisticated version of a tool used in fifth grade called "Guess and Check".

It's much more effective to allow solutions to problems to emerge from the people close to the problem rather than to impose them from higher up.

Necessity is the mother of invention, which probably explains why invention's father left home on the pretext of buying a newspaper and hasn't been heard of since.

Science is nothing but the process of finding solutions.

A pessimist says the glass is half empty, an optimist says the glass is half full, and an engineer says the glass is too big.

Creative thinking is not stimulated by vicarious issues but by personal problems.

December] 20th. [1862] Now I can ride. I have a pumpkin in each end of my sack.

For engineers, designers and other creative problem-solvers, a formal definition of the constraints within which they must work is essential to channel energies and expand creativity.

The key to solving the problem is interaction design before programming.