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Agreed. "It is well-known" should be read as "It is well-known among specialists". On the other hand, I have some professors who abused the word "trivial" to m
by meuk 9y ago
Agreed. "It is well-known" should be read as "It is well-known among specialists".
On the other hand, I have some professors who abused the word "trivial" to mean "it can be proven by me". One professor spent the better half of an hour thinking about a question, only to declare that the answer was trivial. His explanation followed and filled the rest of the hour.
- WhitneyLand 9y agoThat’s funny. I wonder if the origin of the concept of something being trivial only in hindsight can be dated, or has it always been a truism?
- vostok 9y agoI think trivial means that the proof requires no serious amount of creativity.
- zeth__ 9y ago>Takes less than a week to complete.
- alphydan 9y agoRemember that problems in high school typically can take 1/2h to solve, in college a couple of hours ... as a PhD typically a couple of years and as a professional researcher ... many years. So for him, a problem where he was confused 20 minutes and solved it in 10 minutes is probably "trivial".
- contravariant 9y agoThere's a reason there's a somewhat famous joke about a professor who, when asked to explain an step he claimed to be trivial, furrowed his brow deeply, spent the best part of an hour looking at notes and scribbling on the blackboard only to declare afterwards "Yes! It is trivial!'.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoOr the numerous results which are obvious in hindsight.
- ajkjk 9y ago(Not even specialists -- 2nd-3rd year undergraduates in engineering/math/physics!) In that case the word 'trivial' means it doesn't require complex machinery to solve. A simple consequence of arithmetic manipulations, say, may be extremely difficult to think of yourself, but once you know it it's trivial to see the validity of. I believe that counts as 'trivial' in mathematical terminology.