How can I counter a student response saying "Why are we bothered to reinvent the wheel when proving mathematical identities?" I am teaching an undergraduate mathematics course to software engineering students. I often ask my students to prove some mathematical identities as their homework. The identities could be, for example: trigonometry identities, Laplace transform identities, Menelaus', Stewart's, Ceva's theorems, etc.
One special student often just copies other works obtained from the Internet without doing any effort to prove them by himself. When I asked him, he replied &quot;Why are we bothered to reinvent the wheel?&quot;. I have not replied yet and I will do later.
Could you give some advice for countering his argument?
Someone said:*

When you reinvent the wheel, you end up learning a great deal about why wheels are round.

And that is really the point. When you’re at university to get a degree in wheels, you should fully expect not just to be told that wheels exist but to be asked to think deeply about them so that you develop an understanding, at the deepest level, of why they work the way they do. That is literally the whole point of going to college.
*Source: something I read recently somewhere on the Stack Exchange network. The quote is from memory, I can’t find the exact source now unfortunately.