This week's Sunday reflection comes from Jim Propp in a recent Web piece:
"Mathematicians are people who like solving problems, and have the persistence to work on problems that take time to solve, and have collected a mental tool-kit consisting of methods that have helped them solve problems in the past. Some mathematicians distinguish between methods and tricks. A method is a tool that solves more than one problem, while a trick is a tool that applies to only one. Under this definition, I’d say that there are no tricks in math, and part of the discipline of getting good at math is to study every trick you encounter until you see the method hiding inside it."
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