Rating: Summary: A fun read full of nice strategies, tactics, and tools. Review: This book gives NAMES to problem-solving techniques that I've been using for years, which makes it much easier to understand what I'm doing and much easier to talk about it with other people. As a teacher of some pretty bright high school students, this is a great resource for some extra challenging problems. It's also a great resource for anyone running a math club.Of course George Polya's books remain the immortal classics of problem solving, but this book is a crucial addition to the library of any mathematical problem solver or teacher.
Rating: Summary: One of the best Review: This book is indeed one of the best problem-solving textbook so far. As a frequent lecturer of Taiwan IMO team, I have many many MO books. Most of the books available are well-written by professionals and excellent mathematicians. However, since IMO does really prevail in recent years, these authors could not be the participants themselves (^^). Furthermore, usually these books (except those are merely problems collections) contains a good proportion of "harder" and beautiful problems, and the easier and basic training problems are relatively few. It often get the beginners frustrate. Now this maybe is the first book written by a member of former MO team, and now a training lecturer. (The author himself won the USAMO and IMO in 1974, and helped train several USA IMO teams, including the 1994 "perfect score team"). So here is the precious experience! Besides, the ratio between the harder problems and the easier problems is really good. In my opinion this is an excellent textbook for ambitious beginners (both teachers and students), for self-studys and problem-solving fans. Highly recommended.
Rating: Summary: Amazing Review: this book is what a beginner needs. if u like to know how to solve problems and u want to know these "beautiful ideas"... try this book this book maybe "chatty" as one of the customers said ... for some one who knows how to solve problems ..! if u dont know then try it as an introduction
Rating: Summary: save your money Review: This combines two undesirable features of a textbook, namely numerous problems without solutions and a high price. The book's numerous competitors deliver more for a lower price.
Rating: Summary: The Book I wish I had in High School Review: When I was in high school, I placed second in the Alabama State Mathematics Contest and won many others. However, I might could have been competitive with the IMO style problems had I had this book and would be much better off today had I seen this book earlier. This book is for the exceptionally brilliant and the mentally tough. It is absolutely necessary to approach this book in a different way from a standard math textbook. You MUST attempt the examples BEFORE looking at the example solutions, NO MATTER HOW DIFFICULT OR FRUSTRATING. You may be bamboozled by the problems, but even trying to understand the problems before looking at the solutions and thinking about how a solution might proceed will pay huge dividends in the long run. For example, in the first chapter Zeitz presents an example asking the reader to prove that the product of four consecutive integers cannot be a perfect square. The solution involves some clever algebraic trickery not visible to the inexperienced, but persistence and getting your hands dirty is key. If you persist in spite of the considerable difficulty, you will find that you get better very, very quickly. You will also notice that it isn't just contest problems it helps you solve. I have found that I have solved my homework sets in the Berkeley graduate engineering program much more easily since working these problems. You will start to see creative and clever solutions where they exist in everything problem oriented. PATIENCE PATIENCE PATIENCE!
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