Creative Thinking in Solving a Problem

[jedishrfu]

So many times we use tried and true methods to solve problems that we never see the more creative and fanciful solutions that are staring us in the face.

The barometer story is one such example:

http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~steve/astrophysics_07/webpages/barometer_story.htm
Another is the Hades endothermic or exothermic thermodynamics exam question or the story of the late student solving a hitherto unsolved problem in statistics.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hell-endothermic-exothermic/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-problem/

 

[256bits]

The "The Unsolvable Math Problem" I had never seen before.
Interesting.

 

[jedishrfu]

Yeah, people use that story to highlight our hidden abilities to overcome every adversity through persistence, singlemindedness and a belief it can be solved.

Often it gets rewritten for different fields to push some idea beyond the facts of the real story like an urban legend.

We had a similar story at school where an upperclassman found an exact solution to a problem where everyone including the book thought had only an approximate numerical one. Later they found he had actuallyrediscovered the exact solution. But it was still quite an impressive feat.