Dear Problem Solvers,

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”–Albert Einstein

We’re going to continue to talk about problem solving today. We’ll review strategies and talk about methods, but mostly we’ll just talk about problems and the things that make them interesting. As Einstein’s quote implies,  if we want to find a meaningful solution, we need to really know the problem.

Anyways, our bigger goal is to come up with our own problems. That’s the purpose of math: to pos esolveable  problems that might reveal something interesting about the world.Often, the solutions to such problems are incomplete, fleeting, and up for debate, but the problems themselves last a long time.