Trivial

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The Jargon File Parts of this article are based on the Jargon File, v. 4.4.7, a public domain document of hacker jargon.

trivial

Usage: adj. See Also: nontrivial, uninteresting

trivial: adj.

1. Too simple to bother detailing.
2. Not worth the speaker's time.
3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly cretinous would have thought of them already.
4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish trivial usually evaluates to "I've seen it before"). Hackers' notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See nontrivial, uninteresting.

The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an amazing degree (see his essay "Los Alamos From Below" in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!), defined trivial theorem as "one that has already been proved".

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