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Does anyone know the history of where the word "trivial" started being used to mean "easy" instead of as "unimportant", like the author does here? It drives me

Does anyone know the history of where the word "trivial" started being used to mean "easy" instead of as "unimportant", like the author does here? It drives me crazy - but perhaps I'm the one that's wrong. Is it correct to use "trivial" to mean "easy"? I keep thinking it comes from people misunderstanding the meaning of "non-trivial", as in complex

copperx 10y ago
When a math paper or textbook regards a proof as trivial, do they really mean "unimportant"? Not being a native English speaker, that's where I got the impression that trivial meant easy/straightforward.
stan_rogers 10y ago
It literally means "of the trivium" (grammar, logic/dialectic and rhetoric) , or, more broadly, that which can be arrived at by straightforward argument, without further specialized knowledge (covered in the quadrivium). It can, but doesn't necessarily, mean either easy or unimportant. Is identity merely unimportant, or is it also easy? Is a long chain of logic either easy or unimportant merely because it's trivial?
kutkloon7 10y ago
In math, the word is used pretty much as a synonym for 'obvious'. But if you understand something well, it is obvious to you, which is why many results are called trivial by those who understand them. A math professor I had once took a very, very long time to think about a question. After that, his first response was 'that is trivial', after which a quite long explanation followed.
jaclaz 10y ago
Well, there are reasons why there are dictionaries and ethimology dictionaries: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trivial http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trivial http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=trivial http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=trivial it has usually two slightly different meanings, adopted more or less at the same time at the end of the 16th century in English. The actual meaning is not (in this context) "unimportant" and not exactly "easy", but rather - as I see it slightly different - "simple" in the sense of "commonplace" or rather "at the reach of the ordinary people". As well, non-trivial does not IMHO really mean "complex" but rather "beyond the reach of the ordinary people" or "needing some non-common reasoning or tools/methods to be reached", it is almost the same, but not exactly the same.

copperx 10y ago

When a math paper or textbook regards a proof as trivial, do they really mean "unimportant"? Not being a native English speaker, that's where I got the impression that trivial meant easy/straightforward.

stan_rogers 10y ago

It literally means "of the trivium" (grammar, logic/dialectic and rhetoric) , or, more broadly, that which can be arrived at by straightforward argument, without further specialized knowledge (covered in the quadrivium). It can, but doesn't necessarily, mean either easy or unimportant. Is identity merely unimportant, or is it also easy? Is a long chain of logic either easy or unimportant merely because it's trivial?

kutkloon7 10y ago

In math, the word is used pretty much as a synonym for 'obvious'. But if you understand something well, it is obvious to you, which is why many results are called trivial by those who understand them. A math professor I had once took a very, very long time to think about a question. After that, his first response was 'that is trivial', after which a quite long explanation followed.

jaclaz 10y ago

Well, there are reasons why there are dictionaries and ethimology dictionaries: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trivial http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trivial http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=trivial http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=trivial it has usually two slightly different meanings, adopted more or less at the same time at the end of the 16th century in English. The actual meaning is not (in this context) "unimportant" and not exactly "easy", but rather - as I see it slightly different - "simple" in the sense of "commonplace" or rather "at the reach of the ordinary people". As well, non-trivial does not IMHO really mean "complex" but rather "beyond the reach of the ordinary people" or "needing some non-common reasoning or tools/methods to be reached", it is almost the same, but not exactly the same.