Thursday, June 08, 2006

A Note on Triviality

Something that is trivial is clear, easy and obvious. But triviality is relative. For example, Chinese people might think the Chinese language is trivial, but it is incredibly complicated for everyone else. They key here is to consider your audience (your frame of reference, in physics terms). If I tell you that juggling is easy and trivial, that won't encourage you much, will it? So even if juggling, or math, or whatever you do is easy for you, that's not what's important when communicating with people. What matters is how they view the topic at hand.

So the next time a student asks you "what's the sine of pi/2?" don't say "that's trivial!" Just calmly explain that it's one, and make sure to explain why.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That reminds me. My math teacher in the fall and winter talked a lot about how various things should be defined, in math, for the greatest amount of rigor, and he said that the trigonometric functions should actually be defined in terms of the Euler expansion of e. So, Sin[x] = Im[Exp[i*x]], and Cos[x] = Re[Exp[i*x]]. And, of course, Exp[i*x] can be defined in terms of the infinite-series expansion of the exponential function. Ha! No more tricky right triangles!

Anonymous said...

5 club backcrosses is trivial...

Julenka said...

Nate, that's one of the most un-trivial things I've ever heard :P
Anonymous: then you should be able to do them for 100 catches without dropping. Regularly.