It's a useful technique not just for undergraduates. Here are two famous computer science examples. * Dana Scott discovered the lattice based model of the λ-ca

It's a useful technique not just for undergraduates. Here are two famous computer science examples. * Dana Scott discovered the lattice based model of the λ-calculus while trying to prove that no set theoretic models exist. This put functional programming on the map. * Volker Strassen found his fast matrix multiplication while trying to show that the traditional O(n^3) is optimal. This might have been the first or one of the first non-trivial and unexpected innovations that came from the then new field of computational complexity.