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I happen to come across this page http://math.uchicago.edu/~chonoles/quotations.html which contains some beautiful quotes by various mathematicians and I came across Qiaochu's quote as claimed by the site which seemed intriguing.

"I believe that in mathematics nothing is a trick if seen from a sufficiently high level." - Qiaochu Yuan

Now I was wondering if anyone could interpret (maybe even Qiaochu himself) and give examples in mathematics that would convey the meaning of this quote.

NB: Hopefully this question isn't too off topic? Can a moderator turn this into a wiki if deemed appropriate? Also, any appropriate tags?

Edit: Since my question wasn't clear as I would have liked, I'd prefer this question to be example based. So I'd like as much examples from different areas of matheamtics as possible. Since a lot of users on this site are at different levels in terms of the amount of mathematics one has learned, maybe anyone can contribute by giving examples say at a high school level, undergraduate level, graduate level, or research level etc.

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    As great as the quote is, it seems that there is at least one trick -the Poisson integral trick for evaluating $\int_0^{\infty}e^{-x^2}dx$: https://www.unf.edu/~dbell/Poisson.pdf But then again, I wonder if we can see it from a higher level so that it stops being just a trick?2012-10-17
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    Interestingly, I believe it is the other way around. Everything is a *trick* and then the *trick* is then used to create an abstraction, which in turn gives a better insight into the *trick*. But the *trick* is the one which kick starts the process.2013-12-08

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