Tragically, policymakers have thrown horrendous amounts of taxpayer money needed for other purposes at solving an unsubstantiated emergency. It is scandalous that so many climate scientists who fully knew that Al Gore had no basis for his irresponsible claims stood mute.
I got no thrill from solving an integral equation, but I did get a thrill from building an exotic piece of equipment that worked.
I credit my mom with inspiring in me a love of design, matched by her creative problem-solving abilities. This is a woman who could find an old, discarded piece of furniture, bring it home and turn it into something fabulous.
The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic.
I enjoyed biology in high school, and that brought me to a research lab at U.C. Santa Barbara. I loved doing experiments, and I had fun with them. I realized this kind of problem-solving fit my intellectual style.
Our nation, in a short quarter-millennium, catapulted itself to global preeminence by solving the world's greatest problems and exporting those solutions to the rest of the world.
The great thing about working in comics is that visually, you're the sole voice. You have to figure out the staging, the lighting, the composition, the character emotions, the action. You get a script, but you're trying to work it out in individual panels. It's a terrific exercise in creative thinking and creative problem-solving.
The advantage of the analytical approach is that it is widely applicable, and it can provide a considerable amount of quantitative information even with a relatively poor resolving power.
One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.
All the scientists who are working on solving the problem of curing paralysis say that it won't do you any good if you don't keep your body in shape.
