Solving and sorting

Been back to reading a lot again, How to solve it. The maths part of this book wasn't great as well the writing style being old text book. Colours, chapters and descriptions would have been nice rather than the maths equivalent of the old Haynes proverb, fitting is reverse of removal.

One of the things I did like was the idea that with all problems you need to get purchase on the problem at hand. This maybe by digging a screw driver into the problem, waggle it and look for signs, which seems quite foreign to me as a way of solving a maths problem.

There is also a lot of good common sense items,

• Start at the end and work backwords
• Did you use all the data.
• What are the data (written that way all through the text)? Unknowns etc.
• What is the condition?
• Use auxiliary elements.
• Use auxiliary problems to simplify until the ridiculous.
• Have you solved something like the problem before?

After reading clean code, I should know quick sort, I did take a quick youtube refresher. I think I am making it harder than it should be.