A stunning, ignorance-based false belief I have witnessed while observing a class of a math education colleague is that there is no general formula for the n-th Fibonacci number. I wonder if this false belief comes from conflating the (difficult) lack of formulas for prime numbers with something that is just over the horizon of someone whose interests never stretch beyond high-school math.
Behind a number of the elementary false beliefs listed here there is a widespread tendency among people to give up too easily (maybe when having to read at least to page 2 in a book), or to nourish an ego that allows to conclude that something is impossible if they cannot do it themselves.
