Quotes About Problem-solving

The trouble with computers, she thought, was that they had no intuitive senses. Only deductive ones. You had to ask the right question.

At Shimer we paid no attention to disciplinary boundaries; we blithely followed problems wherever they led. For better or for worse, I've never been able to shake this approach.

Vyasa draws attention to a peculiar human trait of trying to solve a problem through external means without bringing about any internal transformation.

We deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice test. I am here to share with you, it is not learning.

As a kid, I had my head under the hood of a car, either an old Ford or a Chevrolet, just learning about it so if anything happened, I could repair it.

It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.

There lived ten-year-old Encyclopedia Brown

Life is a lot more fun if you treat its challenges in creative ways.

In life, never spend more than 10 percent of your time on the problem, and spend at least 90 percent of your time on the solution.

This is one of the glories of man, the inventiveness of the human mind and the human spirit: whenever life doesn't seem to give an answer, we create one.

Life is a continuous exercise in creative problem solving.

In order to fix it, you need a passionate anger about something that doesn't work well.

Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

When life gives you lemons, you exchange them at the store for something more edible.

Architecture and building is about how you get around the obstacles that are presented to you. That sometimes determines how successful you'll be: How good are you at going around obstacles?

She talked about getting some Pam cooking spray—or WD-40, but Pam was cheaper—because coating the walls of the toilet chutes with it makes waste less likely to stick.

When I got done, I'm looking at these two floppies that look just the same. And I decided that I might have written onto the good one from the bad, and I did. So I had lost it all. I went back to my hotel room. I slept for a while. I got up about 10:00 a.m. or so. I sat down and, out of my head and my listings, recreated everything, got it working again, and we showed it at the show.

Why things happen, I just don't know. Maybe somebody has a need and, in our case, we had a need. That's what triggered the idea. Sometimes ideas are born out of necessity: you solve a problem for yourself, and you hopefully solve it for a number of other people too.

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence

If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.

We modern people are problem-solvers, but the demand for answers crowds out patience—and perhaps, especially, patience with mystery, with that which we cannot control.

I've solved a problem that was thought to be unsolvable. . . . And I learned that only a small part of it is talent. The rest is determination. . . . The will is everything.

THERE WERE AT least two ways to solve any problem: from the beginning, which was the usual approach; and from the end, which was not. Likewise, every theorem could be proved either directly, using incremental logic, or indirectly, by conjecturing the negative of the hypothesis and demonstrating a contradiction. Thus there were at least four permutations to choose from.

Diz-se que entre os seus alunos alexandrinos esteve Arquimedes, o matemático e engenheiro que, reza a lenda, foi morto por um soldado romano após o cerco de Siracusa porque se recusou a abandonar um problema que estava a estudar - «Não venha interferir com os meus círculos», teria ele dito.