338:! And it comes in zillon flavors. And Vilenkin's joke comes with a grain of truth: very often in maths it so happens a problem may solved by a reduction to a more complex one. But contrary to common anti-geek lore, mathematicians don't sit happy at that: they strive to seek a simpler and a more elegant solution.
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It is not a principle. It is a mathematician cracked a joke. I an popular math book. Another famous mathematician retold it. In a serious math book. That's it. Now what is the actual name of the principle in question? The fact you cannot guess it reminds me an old joke about another scientist who was
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the subject in detail, rather than simply cite its usage. The very fact that nearly each time someone uses the term in a text feels obliged to quote the joke means it is simply a joke no one really knows. Compare with e.g.,
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Nonnotable mathematical inside joke. When googling, of 77 results, if omit copycats of wikipedia and everything2, you will find only a handful of actual use, plus at least 4 other, totally different meaning of the phrase:
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per nom, but if there is a suitable home for this article as a subsection somewhere else, I would have no opposition to merging it there. (can't find one right now, something like
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I can find zillions of jokes quoted in various books, but none of them become notable, for a simple reason: for notability purposes, we must have multiple sources which write
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Reduction is indeed a word for the same principle, but the only links on the reduction disambiguation page you linked to that looks close to the concept are
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because one of them merely quotes the other rather than adding any new material on this subject. —
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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below.
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Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
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