  This paper is intended to provide an introduction to cut elimination which is
accessible to a broad mathematical audience. Gentzen's cut elimination theorem
is not as well known as it deserves to be, and it is tied to a lot of
interesting mathematical structure. In particular we try to indicate some
dynamical and combinatorial aspects of cut elimination, as well as its
connections to complexity theory. We discuss two concrete examples where one
can see the structure of short proofs with cuts, one concerning feasible
numbers and the other concerning "bounded mean oscillation" from real analysis.
