How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method

TL;DR — Pólya’s method for attacking a problem you do not know how to solve — understand, plan, execute, look back.

Princeton Science Library edition, with a foreword by John Conway.

Pólya’s four-step heuristic — understand the problem, devise a plan, carry it out, look back — is the ancestor of most of what is now called problem-solving methodology. The value is in the questions he supplies for when you are stuck: what is the unknown, what is the data, have you seen a related problem, can you solve a special case.

General well beyond mathematics, which is why it keeps appearing on lists like this one.

Where this came from

• Will Manidis’s “most underrated PDF” thread

284 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.