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| Authored by: PolR on Thursday, July 12 2012 @ 09:48 PM EDT |
This is opinion, not citation. Did you read text books of mathematics as opposed
to opinions in the media?
Mathematicians distinguish between degrees of difficulty in proofs. For example,
in John D. Baum, Elements of Point Set Topology, currently available from Dover
publications, we encounter this description of the Tychonoff theorem (p. 75).
"Up till this point the questions and answers (via theorems) have been
relatively easy. We come now to a problem of an order of difficulty not
encountered before."
This author reserves the word trivial to the easiest theorems. For example I
find in the same book on page 33 this following sentence:
"The proof of (2) is left as a trivial exercise."
This usage of the word trivial and this discrimination among degrees of
difficulty is typical of the textbooks of mathematics I have read so far.
Trivial means something so simple it is not worth explaining. But
mathematicians
take great pain to explain a lot of material. Clearly not everything is trivial.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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