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85 votes
19 answers
15k views

Each mathematician has only a few tricks

The question "Every mathematician has only a few tricks" originally had approximately the title of my question here, but originally admitted an interpretation asking for a small collection ...
170 votes
47 answers
34k views

Every mathematician has only a few tricks

In Gian-Carlo Rota's "Ten lessons I wish I had been taught" he has a section, "Every mathematician has only a few tricks", where he asserts that even mathematicians like Hilbert ...
31 votes
4 answers
2k views

Expert, Intuitive, Organizing Analogies

In learning a new area it is very helpful to have high-level intuitive analogies that keep track of the various parts of an important argument or strategy. Experts have a store of such things, and ...
42 votes
26 answers
8k views

Where can square roots come from when they are not distances?

In a recent survey "Supergeometry in Mathematics and Physics", Kapranov points out cases in which observable quantities of immediate interest are represented as bilinear combinations of more ...
50 votes
37 answers
6k views

Structures that turn out to exhibit a symmetry even though their definition doesn't

Sometimes (often?) a structure depending on several parameters turns out to be symmetric w.r.t. interchanging two of the parameters, even though the definition gives a priori no clue of that symmetry. ...