George Polya

George Polya was born in Budapest?, Hungary on December 13, 1887 and died in Palo Alto, USA on September 7, 1985.

He worked on a great variety of mathematical topics, including series, number theory, combinatorics, and probability.

In his later days, he spent considerable effort into trying to characterize the general methods that we use to solve problems, and to describe how problem-solving should be taught and learned. He wrote the book How to solve it (Princeton, 1945), which has sold a million copies.

[quotations by Polya]