Math Professor

Posted by devtechieguy@reddit | Jokes | View on Reddit | 14 comments

There's a professor in a math class. During the lecture he declares a theorem and says that the proof is trivial, then moves on.

After class, a student comes up to him and asks him about the proof that the professor claimed was trivial.

The student says he doesn't see how you would do it, and it doesn't seem trivial to him. The professor then looks at the problem and thinks about it. He realises that he doesn't actually immediately know how to prove it. He tells the student to talk to him the next day.

That night the professor looks at the problem again and spends all night figuring out how to prove it. By the morning he's figured it out, and is able to prove it.

The next day the same student comes up to him and asks about the problem.

The professor says: ah yes, I thought about that problem some more, and I can confirm that yes, it is indeed trivial.

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WikiWantsYourPics@reddit

I still remember a guy sitting on the couch, thinking very hard, and another guy standing in front of him, saying 'And therefore such-and-such is true.'

'Why is that?' the guy on the couch asks.

'It's trivial! It's trivial!' the standing guy says, and he rapidly reels off a series of logical steps: 'First you assume thus-and-so, then we have Kerchoff's this-and-that; then there's Waffenstoffer's Theorem, and we substitute this and construct that. Now you put the vector which goes around here and then thus-and-so...' The guy on the couch is struggling to understand all this stuff, which goes on at high speed for about fifteen minutes!

"Finally the standing guy comes out the other end, and the guy on the couch says, 'Yeah, yeah. It's trivial.'

We physicists were laughing, trying to figure them out. We decided that 'trivial' means 'proved.' So we joked with the mathematicians: 'We have a new theorem - that mathematicians can only prove trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial.'

-Richard Feynman

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-dr-bones-@reddit

Mildly funny, but confused between "trivial" (which means applies in degenerate or uninteresting cases) and "easy" (which means always applies, but is structurally simple).

But whatever...

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