[hpcjoe]

There's an old joke in math/physics student circles that covers this.

Student goes to see the prof in their office hours to try to understand something the prof said is seen to be trivial. They spend 4 hours working on it, and the student returns to their friends in class. They ask how it went. The student says "yeah, it was trivial."

For those who don't quite get the joke, 4 hours to show something is trivial, tends to not support that the thing is trivial to comprehend.

[pdpi]

To be fair there is a grain of truth to the joke. E.g. Cayley’s theorem is sort of like that — once you get it, it feels like it barely qualifies as a theorem, it’s just a natural consequence of the definitions involved.