George Pólya
Hungarian-American mathematician and educator (1887–1985)
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Through Combinatorics, Numerical analysis and Heuristic
Life and works
Pólya was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, to Anna Deutsch and Jakab Pólya, Hungarian Jews who had converted to Christianity in 1886. Although his parents were religious and he was baptized into the Catholic Church upon birth, George eventually grew up to be an agnostic. He received a PhD under Lipót Fejér in 1912, at Eötvös Loránd University. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He remained a professor emeritus at Stanford for the rest of his career, working on a range of mathematical topics, including series, number theory, mathematical analysis, geometry, algebra, combinatorics, and probability. He was invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians at Bologna in 1928, at Oslo in 1936 and at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1950. He continued lecturing part-time and publishing books into his nineties, decades after his official retirement in 1953.
On September 7, 1985, Pólya died at age 97 in Palo Alto, California, due to complications of a stroke he suffered during that summer. He was survived by his wife Stella, after 67 years of marriage.
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Heuristics
Early in his career, Pólya wrote with Gábor Szegő two influential problem books, Problems and Theorems in Analysis (I: Series, Integral Calculus, Theory of Functions and II: Theory of Functions, Zeros, Polynomials, Determinants, Number Theory, Geometry). Later in his career, he spent considerable effort to identify systematic methods of problem solving to foster discovery and invention for students, teachers, and researchers. He wrote five books on the subject: How to Solve It, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning (Volume I: Induction and Analogy in Mathematics, and Volume II: Patterns of Plausible Inference), and Mathematical Discovery: On Understanding, Learning, and Teaching Problem Solving (volumes 1 and 2).
In How to Solve It, Pólya provides general heuristics for solving a gamut of mathematical and non-mathematical problems. The book includes advice for teachers and a mini-encyclopedia of heuristic terms. It was translated into several languages and has sold over a million copies. The book is still used in mathematical education. Douglas Lenat's Automated Mathematician and Eurisko artificial intelligence programs were inspired by Pólya's work.
In addition to his works directly addressing problem solving, Pólya authored another short book called Mathematical Methods in Science edited by Leon Bowden, initially a 1963 work supported by the National Science Foundation, later revised in 1977. As Pólya notes in the preface, Bowden carefully followed a tape recording of a course that Pólya taught several times at Stanford, in order to put the book together. Pólya notes in the preface that "the following pages will be useful, yet they should not be regarded as a finished expression."
Legacy
There are three prizes named after Pólya, causing occasional confusion of one for another. In 1969 the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) established the George Pólya Prize, given alternately in two categories for "a notable application of combinatorial theory" and for "a notable contribution in another area of interest to George Pólya." In 1976 the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) established the George Pólya Award "for articles of expository excellence" published in the College Mathematics Journal. In 1987 the London Mathematical Society (LMS) established the Pólya Prize for "outstanding creativity in, imaginative exposition of, or distinguished contribution to, mathematics within the United Kingdom."
In 1991, the MAA established the George Pólya Lectureship series. Stanford University has a Polya Hall named in his honor.