Is this quote real? I'm familiar with George Pólya's, "If you cannot solve the proposed problem, try to solve first a simpler related problem" but I cannot find any source for the Lenstra quote.
I also found it connected to Polya [1]
I’ve heard him say it myself in a lecture on the AKS primality test. So, ehh, the source is oral tradition I guess.
That doesn’t induce nicely. Unless it was an insult.
It’s not induction. It’s just the contrapositive of “if you can solve the simpler problem then you can solve the harder problem”
Monotonic sequences can be bounded!
If you could solve the simpler problems, you’d be able to solve the larger problem. But you can’t, because you can’t even solve a simple problem.
It reads like the famous Churchill quote about "if you gave me poison I would drink it"
For every problem you can't solve, there's a simpler problem that you also can't solve.