(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Reading this post in which Mark Palko quotes from the classic “How to Solve It” by the legendary mathematician and math educator George Polya, I was reminded of my decades-long aversion to Polya, an attitude that might seem odd given that (a) Polya has an excellent reputation, and (b) I’ve never read more than a paragraph of anything he’s written.
Why this attitude? Because I did the training program for the high school math olympiad one summer, and Polya was, like, the god of the people who ran that program. The olympiad program had all sorts of attitudes I couldn’t stand—the one I remember most was that using calculus or Cartesian coordinates to solve geometry problems was considered a form of cheating (see the last two paragraphs of this post, also this), and so I ended up with a negative attitude toward Polya and everyone else associated with school mathematics competitions. Completely unfair, I’m sure. I bet if I were to read Polya now, I’d think he’s great.
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