Basic Chemistry: A Problem-Solving Approach (Gendell, Julien)

Problem Solving in Chemistry

When the first author began work in chemical education, he became interested in research on problem solving for several reasons. First, problem solving is what chemists do, regardless of whether they work in the area of synthesis, spectroscopy, theory, analysis, or the characterization of compounds. Second, it was clear that individuals who were successful in chemistry courses either developed ...

A Problem-Solving Approach

A New Approach for Solving Interval Quadratic Programming Problem

This paper discusses an Interval Quadratic Programming (IQP) problem, where the constraints coefficients and the right-hand sides are represented by interval data. First, the focus is on a common method for solving Interval Linear Programming problem. Then the idea is extended to the IQP problem. Based on this method each IQP problem is reduced to two classical Quadratic Programming (QP) proble...

An Approach for Solving Traveling Salesman Problem

In this paper, we introduce a new approach for solving the traveling salesman problems (TSP) and provide a solution algorithm for a variant of this problem. The concept of the proposed method is based on the Hungarian algorithm, which has been used to solve an assignment problem for reaching an optimal solution. We introduced a new fittest criterion for crossing over such problems, and illu...

Non-Mathematical Problem Solving in Organic Chemistry

Differences in problem-solving ability among organic chemistry graduate students and faculty were studied within the domain of problems that involved the determination of the structure of a molecule from the molecular formula of the compound and a combination of IR and H NMR spectra. The participants’ performance on these tasks was compared across variables that included amount of research expe...