proof by example: | The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it contains most of the ideas of the general proof. |
proof by intimidation: | "Trivial." |
proof by vigorous handwaving: | Works well in a classroom or seminar setting. |
proof by cumbersome notation: | Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special symbols. |
proof by exhaustion: | An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful. |
proof by omission: | 'The reader may easily supply the details' "The other 253 cases are analogous" "..." |
proof by obfuscation: | A long plotless sequence of true and/or meaningless syntactically related statements. |
proof by wishful citation: | The author cites the negation, converse, or generalization of a theorem from the literature to support his claims. |
proof by funding: | How could three different government agencies be wrong? |
proof by eminent authority: | "I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP-complete." |
proof by personal communication: | "Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete ." |
proof by reduction to the wrong problem: | "To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is decidable, we reduce it to the halting problem." |
proof by reference to inaccessible literature: | The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883. |
proof by importance: | A large body of useful consequences all follow from the proposition in question. |
proof by accumulated evidence: | Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample. |
proof by cosmology: | The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or meaningless. Popular for proofs of the existence of God. |
proof by mutual reference: | In reference A, Theorem 5 is said to follow from Theorem 3 in reference B, which is shown to follow from Corollary 6.2 in reference C, which is an easy consequence of Theorem 5 in reference A. |
proof by metaproof: | A method is given to construct the desired proof. The correctness of the method is proved by any of these techniques. |
proof by picture: | A more convincing form of proof by example. Combines well with proof by omission. |
proof by vehement assertion: | It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience. |
proof by ghost reference: | Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given. |
proof by forward reference: | Reference is usually to a forthcoming paper of the author, which is often not as forthcoming as at first. |
proof by semantic shift: | Some of the standard but inconvenient definitions are changed for the statement of the result. |
proof by appeal to intuition: | Cloud-shaped drawings frequently help here. |