Thinking books · Problem solving · Lehoczky & Rusczyk, 1993
The Art of Problem Solving — the big ideas
A competition-mathematics text whose real subject is how to attack an unfamiliar problem.
Free — no account needed to read
The big ideas
It trains the habit of trying small cases first and looking for the pattern, rather than attempting the general problem immediately.
It treats elegance as diagnostic: a long ugly solution usually means the structure of the problem has not been seen yet.
Its difficulty is deliberate. Struggling productively on a problem for an hour teaches more than reading ten solutions, and it says so.
Practise it — no need to have read it
Take a complicated problem and solve the smallest possible version of it — two customers, one week, one feature. Look for the pattern.
A hint: Then ask what changes as it scales, rather than starting at full size.
Where it shows up in real life
- Technical design
- Analysis under uncertainty
- Building intuition in a new domain
Described in our own words with the source named — never quoted, and not a substitute for reading the book.
Thinking methods from this book
- The four steps — A general procedure for any problem you do not immediately know how to solve.
The thinking it builds
- Problem Solving — Break complex problems into manageable parts
- Logical Thinking — Reason consistently