“It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem—if not generally solved—did appear to have tractable special solutions.”
Part V (p. 236)
Earth (1990)
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David Brin 123
novelist, short story writer 1950Related quotes
Source: Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search (1975), p. 120.

Source: 1980s, That Benediction is Where You Are (1985), p. 18
Context: From childhood we are trained to have problems. When we are sent to school, we have to learn how to write, how to read, and all the rest of it. How to write becomes a problem to the child. Please follow this carefully. Mathematics becomes a problem, history becomes a problem, as does chemistry. So the child is educated, from childhood, to live with problems — the problem of God, problem of a dozen things. So our brains are conditioned, trained, educated to live with problems. From childhood we have done this. What happens when a brain is educated in problems? It can never solve problems; it can only create more problems. When a brain that is trained to have problems, and to live with problems, solves one problem, in the very solution of that problem, it creates more problems. From childhood we are trained, educated to live with problems and, therefore, being centred in problems, we can never solve any problem completely. It is only the free brain that is not conditioned to problems that can solve problems. It is one of our constant burdens to have problems all the time. Therefore our brains are never quiet, free to observe, to look. So we are asking: Is it possible not to have a single problem but to face problems? But to understand those problems, and to totally resolve them, the brain must be free.

“When you have a big problem to solve, break it down to smaller ones first.”
page 5
Dark Rooms (2002)
Source: Engineering Education and Engineering Practice in the Year 2000 (1967), p. 134-135 as cited in: Ben. F. Barton (1981) The nature and treatment of professional engineering problems: The technical writing teacher's responsibility. p. 19
Generation of Greatness (1957)
Context: I believe that each young person is different from any other who has ever lived, as different as his fingerprints: that he could bring to the world a wonderful and special way of solving unsolved problems, that in his special way, he can be great. Now don't misunderstand me. I recognize that this merely great person, as distinguished from the genius, will not be able to bridge from field to field. He will not have the ideas that shorten the solution of problems by hundreds of years. He will not suddenly say that mass is energy, that is genius. But within his own field he will make things grow and flourish; he will grow happy helping other people in his field, and to that field he will add things that would not have been added, had he not come along.

As quoted in Man Creates Art Creates Man (1973) by Duane Preble, p. 14
Variant translation: Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.
As quoted in Architecture: form, space, and order (2007) by Francis D.K. Ching, p. ix
Context: After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s theory of relativity — now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin.
Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Original: Il segreto per risolvere un problema è avere la forza di trovare una soluzione. Quando la soluzione non esiste, la inventi.
Source: prevale.net