Timeline for On math looking obvious in retrospect [closed]
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
24 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 18, 2021 at 20:52 | review | Reopen votes | |||
| Jun 19, 2021 at 18:20 | |||||
| Mar 30, 2021 at 18:40 | review | Reopen votes | |||
| Mar 30, 2021 at 21:18 | |||||
| Aug 19, 2019 at 3:05 | review | Reopen votes | |||
| Aug 19, 2019 at 10:05 | |||||
| Aug 13, 2019 at 15:05 | review | Reopen votes | |||
| Aug 13, 2019 at 18:44 | |||||
| Aug 13, 2019 at 2:30 | review | Reopen votes | |||
| Aug 13, 2019 at 10:42 | |||||
| Aug 13, 2019 at 2:27 | history | closed |
user44143 user1073 Yemon Choi j.c. Timothy Chow |
Opinion-based | |
| Aug 13, 2019 at 2:27 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | I like this topic but I agree that there is no question here and so MO doesn't seem to be the right venue. Voting to close. | |
| Aug 12, 2019 at 19:24 | comment | added | shane.orourke | The title reminds me of someone (possibly Zel'manov) who likened proving a result for the first time to breaking down a door. It's only afterwards you find the handle. | |
| Aug 12, 2019 at 16:34 | comment | added | WGroleau | “Given: the existing body of maths; by inspection, the theorem follows.” (Richard Armour) | |
| Aug 12, 2019 at 14:09 | answer | added | JoshuaZ | timeline score: 9 | |
| Aug 12, 2019 at 10:28 | history | edited | YCor | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
removed capitals from title
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| Aug 12, 2019 at 4:46 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Aug 11, 2019 at 22:47 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Todd Trimble | ||
| Aug 11, 2019 at 22:19 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | I'm voting to close this question because it seems too open-ended and "discussion-inviting": MO is not really meant as a forum for chatting and evolving conversations | |
| Aug 11, 2019 at 22:04 | answer | added | Pace Nielsen | timeline score: 40 | |
| Aug 11, 2019 at 21:45 | review | Close votes | |||
| Aug 12, 2019 at 21:23 | |||||
| Aug 11, 2019 at 21:39 | comment | added | Sam | One useful thing I try to remember is "in mathematics everything is either trivial or impossible" | |
| Aug 11, 2019 at 21:26 | comment | added | user44143 | Some soft questions are ok, but so far there’s no question here, and “what is your personal opinion of this?” is off topic. | |
| Aug 11, 2019 at 21:19 | answer | added | paul garrett | timeline score: 27 | |
| Aug 11, 2019 at 21:17 | comment | added | Ivan Di Liberti | One should also mention Freyd: the purpose of category theory is "to show that which is trivial is trivially trivial" | |
| Aug 11, 2019 at 21:03 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | In some sense the dream of Grothendieck was to make everything "almost obvious". | |
| Aug 11, 2019 at 20:59 | comment | added | spin | As the first comment here notes, it is true about all of math that bringing clarity into a problem or a result can make it seem "obvious" or less interesting. Whether something is really obvious would depend on the context (who what when). For example with modern methods calculating the area of a parabolic segment might seem easy or trivial, but it certainly was not that for Archimedes few thousand years ago. | |
| Aug 11, 2019 at 20:49 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | There's an extent to which everything looks obvious in retrospect, especially for material which has been given the "textbook treatment." But if you are just looking for, e.g., two examples from combinatorics of long-standing problems which were recently solved via totally elementary and indeed quite short proofs, the resolution of the capset problem by Croot-Lev-Pach/Ellenberg-Gijswijt and the resolution of the sensitivity conjecture by Huang come to mind. You can find discussion of these on Terry Tao's blog: tinyurl.com/y7efley7 and tinyurl.com/yy4kwp7w | |
| Aug 11, 2019 at 20:35 | history | asked | hookah | CC BY-SA 4.0 |