Launched in 2003, Art of Problem Solving (www.artofproblemsolving.com) is an online community for students who love math.

In discussion forums, free online learning opportunities, online competitions, and fee-based classes, students receive both challenge and support as they develop their mathematical problem-solving skills. And problem solving is a topic that AoPS founder Richard Rusczyk is passionate about. Here, he explains why learning to solve problems youve never seen before is the most important thing you can do to shape your future.
Two thousand years ago, if you wanted to shape your own future, you needed to master only one skill: choosing your parents. If you picked an emperor to be dad, you were set. Otherwise, you were pretty much doomed to the poor, nasty, brutish, and short life Hobbes promised. Fast forward to 200 years ago, and you at least had another option. Choosing your parents still worked then. But if you didnt like your lot in life, you could pitch it all and Go West. Building a new life in a new land required incredible bravery, strength, and, above all, luck. Nowadays, however, the only physical frontiers are space and the bottom of the ocean, so fortitude and wanderlust arent enough to blaze your own trail. If you want the freedom to build your own future and pursue your dreams, then your best bet is to learn how to solve problems youve never seen before. Its been more than 20 years since Ive been in high school, but from my discussions with students at Art of Problem Solving, not much has changed in the schools in this regard. Homework assignments and tests still reward memorization and regurgitation of mastered facts, and never confront students with problems that are unlike anything the student has seen before. Repeating mastered tasks may have been valuable 50 years ago, but now we have machines, not to mention billions more people who are very good at mastering straightforward tasks. Unfortunately, the first time most students learn this lesson is in college, staring at a test with five unfamiliar problems for four grueling hours, wondering why those long nights of doing the same problems over and over in high school didnt include any problems like these.

The Problem Youve Never Seen

Todays frontiers are intellectual, not physical. The heroes of your generation wont have titles before their names, like General or President. Theyll have titles after their names, like PhD and CEO. Theyll earn those titles, and the freedom that can come with them, with their minds. The action is out on the intellectual frontier, so thats where you want to be. How do you get there? Is getting As in all your classes enough? Of course not, and it hasnt been for a long time, not even if you plow through the regular curriculum twice as fast as everyone else. When I first started Art of Problem Solving, I received an e-mail from a Princeton classmate of mine. He wrote: I certainly wish your website and materials existed when I was in high school. I went through junior high and high school without ever missing a question on a math test, and then took Math 103 and 104, which was one of the most unpleasant and bewildering experiences of my life, and poisoned me on math for years.

Learning How to Learn

If acing all your classes isnt enough to prepare you for the most rigorous schools and the most competitive careers, then what should you do? This is where problem solving comes in. Theres no set path to success. No batch of drills to follow. No magic formula to memorize. As good as the instructors at Art of Problem Solving are, even we cant teach you that single skill whose mastery will bring you fame, fortune, and world domination. We cant teach you that super skill because no one knows what specific skills will be important in the future. Most of the jobs Ive had since graduating college in 1993 essentially did not exist when I started high school in 1985. There werent a bunch of hedge funds staffed by mathematicians and physicists, and no one had even heard of the Internet. How could my teachers have prepared me for careers in these areas? The situation will be even more extreme for your generation. We educators cant predict the tools youll need, and many of those tools dont even exist yet. Worse yet, mastering narrow skills just sets you up to compete with computers. Thats a battle youre

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Mar/Apr 2011

A Skill for the 21st Century

by Richard Rusczyk
doomed to lose. Computers are better than we are at pretty much every function they perform. But while machines are gradually taking over more and more well-understood tasks, theyre still usually no match for us when facing novel problems. This critical skill, overcoming obstacles youve never encountered before, is problem solving. The key to becoming an excellent problem solver is learning how to learn. This is not only the holy grail of those hoping to develop artificial intelligence, but the main goal of those of us trying to develop human intelligence, too. technological, and medical discoveries that are coupled with innovative engineering and economic implementation to make our lives healthier, longer, and richer in immeasurable ways. Moreover, advancing technologies make our best problem solvers more powerful than ever. We can now leverage the efforts of the few to the benefit of the many in ways never before possible. A century ago, Henry Ford needed thousands of people to revolutionize transportation by building cars. Now, entire industries can be turned upside down, or created out of thin air, by a few dozen people implementing a powerful idea in a creative way. At the core of every one of these revolutions is a small cadre of problem solvers. We know who many of the best problem solvers of tomorrow will betheyre among the best problem-solving students today. This is what motivates many of us who work with these students: We know that they will shape not only their own futures, but ours, too. Richard Rusczyk is the founder of the Art of Problem Solving, the author of several AoPS textbooks, a co-creator of the Mandelbrot Competition, and a past director of the USA Mathematical T alent Search. He was a participant in National MATHCOUNTS, a three-time participant in the Math Olympiad Summer Program, and a USA Mathematical Olympiad winner (1989). He graduated from Princeton University in 1993, and worked as a bond trader for D.E. Shaw & Company for four years. AoPS marks Richards return to his vocationeducating motivated students.

Math & Beyond

We at Art of Problem Solving use mathematics as a vehicle to teach problem solving. Math isnt the only way to learn problem solving, but we think it is the best way. Sadly, math is not often taught as a vehicle for problem solving. Its taught as stuff we know. But mathematics isnt just stuff we know. Its how we know it. Math is the process by which we combine facts to deduce new facts. At heart, it is discovery. Its the language we use to model the world around us, which makes it our most powerful problem-solving tool. Of course, math also has the benefit of being beautiful, but its not an end point for most of our students. Its merely a beginning, as they move on to make their marks in a wide variety of fields, using the problem-solving skills they honed with math. My math peers from high school and college and my past students are not only among the countrys best mathematicians. Theyre also among the countrys best doctors, lawyers, engineers, educators, economists, traders, entrepreneurs, scientists, and programmers. Increasingly, the world is being shaped by the best problem solvers. They make crucial scientific,

To learn more about Art of Problem Solving, visit www.artofproblemsolving.com.

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