The best place to find things: the public library.

It is heartening to be able to end a textbook that has no prerequisites with a problem that has not yet been solved.

the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.

If you can't solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it.

By the time I was a student in high school I was reading the classic Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell and I remember succeeding in proving the classic Fermat theorem about an integer multiplied by itself p times where p is a prime.

the whole problem of discovering what was the matter, and figuring out what you have to do to fix it–that was interesting to me, like a puzzle

I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own.

You know, for any problem, no matter how big or complex it may be, there is a solution. All you have to do is find it. And, you can find it by organizing your approach, by attacking the problem emphatically with determination, by working long and hard, by applying your full brain power and by using wisely all the help you can get. You CAN solve it!

Always try the problem that matters most to you.

To every problem, there is a solution. So, any time challenges arise, I just say to myself, there is a solution, find it!

The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.

When I was in school I liked math because all the problems had answers. Everything else seemed very subjective.

I then reached for a time honored tactic used by mathematicians: if you can't solve the real problem, change it into one you can solve.

In every town we lived in, there was one great big door ready to open for anyone — the library. And I never met a library I didn’t like.