I've seen several question here on what book to read to learn writing and reading proofs. This question is not about that. I've been doing that for a while, and I'm quite comfortable with proofs. I am looking for resources (books, ideally) that can teach not the concept of proofs, but rather some of the specific mathematical tricks that are commonly employed in proofs: those that mostly include clever number manipulation, ad-hoc integration techniques, numerical methods and other thing you are likely never to learn in theory-oriented books. I come mainly from applied math and engineering, and when I look at proofs from Stochastic Processes, Digital Signal Processing, Non-Linear Systems and other applied subjects, I feel like I need to learn a new method to understand every proof I read. Is there any good literature on such mathematical tricks?
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I don't know if you're interested in inequalities, but a very nice book which teaches lots of tricks is Steele's The Cauchy–Schwarz Master Class. |
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I enjoyed Mahajan's Street-Fighting Mathematics. It has a strongly "applied" bent, and is freely available. |
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The Tricki ("Trick Wiki") is an attempt to catalogue such things, although it is somewhat less successful than was initially hoped. |
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