Comment by p0w3n3d
6 hours ago
I remember myself on my first year of CS, set theory classes, at the whiteboard, trying to make a proof, but there something I was not able to prove at all, so I said 'it's trivial' and the doctor said 'yeah, it's trivial' and we went further.
"Trivial" doesn't exclusively mean "easy", though it is often used as a euphemism like that.
In a literal sense, it very well may have been trivial, even if neither you nor the professor would have been able to easily show it.
What's your definition of trivial?
The one I've always flown with is, trivial means (1) a special case of a more general theory (2) which flattens many of the extra frills and considerations of the general theory and (3) is intuitively clear ("easy") to appreciate and compute.
From this perspective, everything is trivial from the relative perspective of a god. I know of no absolute definition of trivial.
the absolute definition of trivial is trivial to show
Maybe it wasn't trivial at all for both of you ...
No, this was really something trivial, in the sense that you could feel it's true. Like 2+2=4 but to prove it you need to create a set of functions, axiom and a theorem