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( This is/was posted on someone's door, whence I copied it. I don't have the source handy )

			HOW TO PROVE IT 

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  
	[Karp, personal communication]."  

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. 

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