You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment
Had to try very hard today to avoid injecting today's calculus lecture with a bit of politics. We were doing calculations by cases (first suppose x isn't 0 to allow you to divide by it and get one set of solutions, then suppose x is 0 to get the rest, etc.) and one of the students asked "What if the assumption that x isn't 0 turns out to be false." Thinking on the fly, here was the best real life example of proof by cases that I could come up with:
A certain government employee has done something really stupid. You're trying to figure out whether to fire his boss or not. There are two options: either the boss knew what the employee was doing and is hence complicit in the stupidity, so we should fire her; or the boss didn't know what the employee was doing and was negligent in her responsibility to oversee her staff's work and so still should be fired.
I actually recall doing some rather complicated real life examples of proof by cases when I was on election tribunal for my Students' Union, where we managed to determine the correct judgment to issue without determining some factual issue which at first sight looked vital for the decision. I can't actually remember any of the details of any of the cases, though.
A certain government employee has done something really stupid. You're trying to figure out whether to fire his boss or not. There are two options: either the boss knew what the employee was doing and is hence complicit in the stupidity, so we should fire her; or the boss didn't know what the employee was doing and was negligent in her responsibility to oversee her staff's work and so still should be fired.
I actually recall doing some rather complicated real life examples of proof by cases when I was on election tribunal for my Students' Union, where we managed to determine the correct judgment to issue without determining some factual issue which at first sight looked vital for the decision. I can't actually remember any of the details of any of the cases, though.