In doing mathematics, we often encounter beautiful identities and proofs, shining like a full moon in the night sky. Some of them have combinatorial flavors. This talk is an introduction to combinatorial proof methods using bijections and weight-preserving-sign-reversing involutions, with examples including Franklin's bijective proof of the Euler pentagonal number theorem, a combinatorial proof of the Cayley-Hamilton theorem, the Robinson-Schensted correspondence and recent combinatorial proofs of some identities involving secant and tangent numbers.

A (positive definite and integral) quadratic form $f$ is called irrecoverable (from its subforms) if there is a quadratic form $F$ that represents all proper subforms except for $f$ itself, and such a quadratic form $F$ is called an isolation of $f$. In this talk, we present recent advances on irrecoverable quadratic forms and discuss their possible generalizations.