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Questions asking for the intuition behind some definition, conjecture, proof etc. In other words, questions designed to improve or to acquire understanding on a conceptual or intuitive level, as opposed to on a technical or formal level. When asking such a question it can be helpful to include a rough description of ones understanding of the subject at hand (on a technical level).

48 votes

Intuition for the last step in Serre's proof of the three-squares theorem

A few days ago Serre told me about some modest improvements to the proof, based on Weil's book Number theory: an approach through history from Hammurapi to Legendre and on a 1998 letter from Deligne t …
Bjorn Poonen's user avatar
  • 23.8k
106 votes
Accepted

Conceptual reason why the sign of a permutation is well-defined?

(This is a variant of Cartier's argument mentioned by Dan Ramras.) Let $X$ be a finite set of size at least $2$. Let $E$ be the set of edges of the complete graph on $X$. The set $D$ of ways of dire …
Bjorn Poonen's user avatar
  • 23.8k