George Pólya

George Polya, an American mathematician of Hungarian origin, was born in Budapest, Hungary, on December 13, 1887, and died in Palo Alto, USA on September 7, 1985.

He worked on a great variety of mathematical topics, including series, number theory, combinatorics, and probability.

In his later days, he spent considerable effort on trying to characterize the general methods that we use to solve problems, and to describe how problem-solving should be taught and learned. He wrote the book How to solve it (Princeton, 1945), which has sold a million copies. A Nobel laureate in physics for 2000 Russian physicist Zhores I. Alfyorov, as he said, was very pleased with Polya's famous book. The book was also translated into several languages.

Some quotes:

• How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics. (This is a mnemonic for the first fourteen digits of π.)

External link: quotations by Polya