Eating the frog

Mathematics is often presented as a very sterile subject, particularly in colleges and undergraduate courses. Exercises and theorems are accompanied by perfect solutions and proofs. In order to solve X you should do A, B, and then C. It’s easy to see the attraction of such an approach — after all maths is the pantheon of logical arguments and, usually, there is only one “correct” answer. However, maths doesn’t work this way in “real life”. No one conjures a theorem out of thin air and then proc...