What counts as a trivial piece of mathematics?
If you read Doron Zeilberger’s entertaining opinions on mathematics, you will find that he makes some apparently very curious remarks about mathematical theorems. Let me quote a couple, just to give the idea: I have a meta-proof that FLT is trivial. After all, a mere human (even though a very talented as far as humans go), with a tiny RAM, disk-space, and very unreliable circuitry, did it. So any theorem that a human can prove is, ipso facto, utterly trivial. (From Opinion 36.) If humans will keep trying to find human proofs, and fail, it will raise the probability that 4CT is indeed deep. On the other hand, if some human will prove 4CT tomorrow, only with pencil-and-paper, then this would be very nice for the prover, who will become instantly famous, but very depressing for our mathematical culture as a whole. It would mean that perhaps we humans are so trivial that we are not even capable of stating and conjecturing deep results. (From Opinion 51.) What is Zeilberger on about? Many m
