Quotes About Problem-solving

Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky -- or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.

George Dantzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved.

Hierarchy means very little to me. Let's put together in meetings the people who can help solve a problem, regardless of position.

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater. —Albert Einstein

Will rolled up his sleeves. "We'll probably have to knock down the door--" "Or," said Jem, reaching out and giving the knob a twist, "not." The door swung open onto a rectangle of darkness. "Now, that's simply laziness," said Will.

Have you tried talking to her?" "No. We've been punching her in the face repeatedly. What? You don't think that will work?

Think about every problem, every challenge, we face. The solution to each starts with education.

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by orginality, overcomes everything.

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

Unless and until all members of a team have a common understanding of the problem, attempts to solve the problem are just so much wasted energy.

When people who are driven by a vision see something wrong, they might say to their teammates, "I feel bad because we're not building the kind of system we can be proud of. What shall we do so we don't feel this way?" On

Testing does not improve a product; the improving is done by people fixing the bugs that testing has uncovered.

Jane easily shifts among activities—testing for discovery, pinpointing, locating, determining significance, repairing, troubleshooting, and testing to learn. As long as she continues to serve her customers, it doesn't really matter which task she performs at any given time.

In the popular image, a problem-solving leader is a solitary genius, but the true leader prefers to produce a success.

Blaming someone else will only put the solution further out of reach.

Think sideways!

When you approach a problem, strip yourself of preconceived opinions and prejudice, assemble and learn the facts of the situation, make the decision which seems to you to be the most honest, and then stick to it.

No matter how big and tough a problem may be, get rid of confusion by taking one little step towards solution. Do something. Then try again. At the worst, so long as you don't do it the same way twice, you will eventually use up all the wrong ways of doing it and thus the next try will be the right one.

Some people approach every problem with an open mouth.

A thousand men can't undress a naked man.

Il bisogno aguzza l'ingegno.

When you have kids, things come at you that you don't expect and you twist and turn to sort it out.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

Every breakthrough business idea begins with solving a common problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. I discovered a big one when I took apart an IBM PC. I made two interesting discoveries: The components were all manufactured by other companies, and the system that retailed for $3,000 cost about $600 in parts.