Making Up Your Own Mind: Thinking Effectively through Creative Puzzle-Solving Hardcover – Illustrated, 20 November 2018
Edward B. Burger . Princeton University Press . English
How you can become better at solving real-world problems by learning creative puzzle-solving skills We solve countless problems―big and small―every day. With so much practice, why do we often have trouble making simple decisions―much less arriving at optimal solutions to important questions? Are we doomed to this muddle―or is there a practical way to learn to think more effectively and creatively? In this enlightening, entertaining, and inspiring book, Edward Burger shows how we can become far better at solving real-world problems by learning creative puzzle-solving skills using simple, effective thinking techniques. Making Up Your Own Mind teaches these techniques―including how to ask good questions, fail and try again, and change your mind―and then helps you practice them with fun verbal and visual puzzles. The goal is not to quickly solve each challenge but to come up with as many different ways of thinking about it as possible. As you see the puzzles in ever-greater depth, your mind will change, helping you become a more imaginative and creative thinker in daily life. And learning how to be a better thinker pays off in incalculable ways for anyone―including students, businesspeople, professionals, athletes, artists, leaders, and lifelong learners. A book about changing your mind and creating an even better version of yourself through mental play, Making Up Your Own Mind will delight and reward anyone who wants to learn how to find better solutions to life’s innumerable puzzles. And the puzzles extend to the thought-provoking format of the book itself because one of the later short chapters is printed upside down while another is printed in mirror image, further challenging the reader to see the world through different perspectives and make new meaning.
Categories: Action & Adventure
About the Author
Edward Burger is the President of Southwestern University as well as an educational and business consultant. Most recently he was the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, and served as Vice Provost for Strategic Educational Initiatives at Baylor University. He is the author of over 60 research articles, books, and video series (starring in over 3,000 on-line videos). Burger was awarded the 2000 Northeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Award for Distinguished Teaching and 2001 MAA Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo National Award for Distinguished Teaching of Mathematics. The MAA also named him their 2001-2003 Polya Lecturer. He was awarded the 2003 Residence Life Teaching Award from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2004 he was awarded Mathematical Association of America's Chauvenet Prize and in 2006 he was a recipient of the Lester R. Ford Prize. In 2007, 2008, and 2011 he received awards for his video work. In 2007 Williams College awarded him the Nelson Bushnell Prize for Scholarship and Teaching. Burger is an associate editor of the American Mathematical Monthly and Math Horizons Magazine and serves as a Trustee of the Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. In 2006, Reader's Digest listed Burger in their annual "100 Best of America" as America's Best Math Teacher. In 2010 he was named the winner of the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching---the largest and most prestigious prize in higher education teaching across all disciplines in the English speaking world. Also in 2010 he starred in a mathematics segment for NBC-TV on the Today Show and throughout the 2010 Winter Olympic coverage. That television appearance won him a 2010 Telly Award. The Huffington Post named him one of their 2010 Game Changers; "HuffPost's Game Changers salutes 100 innovators, visionaries, mavericks, and leaders who are reshaping their fields and changing the world." In 2012, Microsoft Worldwide Education selected him as one of their "Global Heroes in Education." In 2013 Burger was inducted as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
