Ditto, especially with certain programming interview problems or Advent of Code, etc.

You build the small-N brute forcing demo, and then the integer sequences (from correct answers, or from how the overall number of solutions grows) may help find the formal math jargon name behind whatever's going on.

For example, Stirling Numbers of the First Kind [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_numbers_of_the_firs...