“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.”
Source: Enigmas Of Chance (1985), Chapter 6, Cornell II, p. 122.
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Mark Kac 17
Polish-American mathematician 1914–1984Related quotes

Stopped in Our Tracks, Book Two: Excerpts from U.G.'s Dialogues (2005) by K. Chandrasekhar

letter to Koichi Mano (3 February 1966); published in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman (2005), p. 198, 201
also quoted by Freeman Dyson in "Wise Man" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18350, The New York Review of Books (20 October 2005)
Context: The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. … No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.
“If you can't solve a problem, it's because you're playing by the rules”
Source: It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be

Flash Crowd, section 7, in Three Trips in Time and Space (1973), edited by Robert Silverberg, p. 65

Part One, chapter 4, page 18
Why Government Doesn't Work (1995)