Related to or being the mathematically most simple case. More generally, the word "trivial" is used to describe any result which requires little or no effort to derive or prove. The word originates from the Latin trivium, which was the lower division of the seven liberal arts in medieval universities (cf. quadrivium).
According to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (Feynman 1997), mathematicians designate any theorem as "trivial" once a proof has been obtained--no matter how difficult the theorem was to prove in the first place. There are therefore exactly two types of true mathematical propositions: trivial ones, and those which have not yet been proven.
The opposite of a trivial theorem is a "deep theorem."
