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> As others have mentioned, none of Polya matters for selecting and attacking research problems.

While I am not familiar with research problems, and do not pretend to be, some of the strategies to tackle problems in this book are universal. Like finding a similar problem, or a simplified case, or divide and conquer, etc. etc.

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Yea, these are 100% exactly how you should approach a research problem, in mathematics or otherwise.

Literally the first part of almost every research paper is outlining how this thing you're about to talk about is similar and dissimilar to other things. That's often followed by a simplified description of the idea. Then that's usually followed by the thing in full generality.

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