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The first thing to say is that this is not the same as the question about interesting mathematical mistakes. I am interested about the type of false beliefs that many intelligent people have while the …

For vector spaces, $\dim (U + V) = \dim U + \dim V - \dim (U \cap V)$, so $$ \dim(U +V + W) = \dim U + \dim V + \dim W - \dim (U \cap V) - \dim (U \cap W) - \dim (V \cap W) + \dim(U \cap V \cap W), $$ …

It's not mathematics that you need to contribute to. It's deeper than that: how might you contribute to humanity, and even deeper, to the well-being of the world, by pursuing mathematics? Such a que …

A proof of the identity $$1+2+\cdots + (n-1) = \binom{n}{2}$$ (Adapted from an entry I saw at Wolfram Demonstrations, see also the original faster animation) This proof was discovered by Loren Lar …

Irrationality of $2^{1/n}$ for $n\geq 3$: if $2^{1/n}=p/q$ then $p^n = q^n+q^n$, contradicting Fermat's Last Theorem. Unfortunately FLT is not strong enough to prove $\sqrt{2}$ irrational. I've forg …

Everyone knows that for any two square matrices $A$ and $B$ (with coefficients in a commutative ring) that $$\operatorname{tr}(AB) = \operatorname{tr}(BA).$$ I once thought that this implied (via ind …

It can be difficult to learn mathematics on your own from textbooks, and I often wish universities videotaped their mathematics courses and distributed them for free online. Fortunately, some universi …

Can you give examples of proofs without words? In particular, can you give examples of proofs without words for non-trivial results? (One could ask if this is of interest to mathematicians, and I woul …

Are there any examples in the history of mathematics of a mathematical proof that was initially reviewed and widely accepted as valid, only to be disproved a significant amount of time later, possibly …

How big a gap is there between how you think about mathematics and what you say to others? Do you say what you're thinking? Please give either personal examples of how your thoughts and words differ …

Question: I'm asking for a big list of not especially famous, long open problems that anyone can understand. Community wiki, so one problem per answer, please. Motivation: I plan to use this list in …

"If a set X is smaller in cardinality than another set Y, then X has fewer subsets than Y." Althought the statement sounds obvious, it is actually independent of ZFC. The statement follows from the …

The closure of the open ball of radius $r$ in a metric space, is the closed ball of radius $r$ in that metric space. In a somewhat related spirit: the boundary of a subset of (say) Euclidean space ha …

The Busemann-Petty problem (posed in 1956) has an interesting history. It asks the following question: if $K$ and $L$ are two origin-symmetric convex bodies in $\mathbb{R}^n$ such that the volume of e …

Many students believe that 1 plus the product of the first $n$ primes is always a prime number. They have misunderstood the contradiction in Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many primes. (By …