How to Solve It is the most significant contribution to heuristic since Descartes' Discourse on Method. The title is accurate enough, but the subtitle is far too modest: the examples are drawn mostly from elementary math, but the method applies to nearly every problem one might encounter. (Microsoft, for instance, used to and may still give this book to all of its new programmers.) Polya divides the problem-solving process into four stages--Understanding the Problem, Devising a Plan, Carrying out the Plan, and Looking Back--and supplies for each stage a series of questions that the solver cycles through until the problem is solved. The questions--what is the unknown? what are the data? what is the condition? is the condition sufficient? redundant? contradictory? could you restate the problem? is there a related problem that has been solved before?--have become classics; as a computer programmer I ask them on the job every day.

The book is short, 250 large-print pages in the paperback. Its style is clear, brilliant and does not lack in humor. Here is Polya's description of the traditional mathematics professor: "He usually appears in public with a lost umbrella in each hand. He prefers to face the blackboard and turn his back on the class. He writes A; he says B; he means C; but it should be D." Behind the humor, though, lurks a serious complaint about mathematical pedagogy. Fifty years ago, when Polya was writing, and today still, mathematics was presented to the student, under the tyranny of Euclid, as a magnificent but frozen edifice, a series of inexorable deductions. Even the student who could follow the deductions was left with no idea how they were arrived at. How to Solve It was the first and best attempt to demystify math, by concentrating on the process, not the result. Polya himself taught mathematics at Stanford for many years, and one can only envy his students. But the next best thing is to read his book.