wafer #1: non-trivials

Terence Tao once described a Law of Conservation of Difficulty in mathematics, which states that “in order to prove any genuinely non-trivial result, some hard work has to be done somewhere.” In other words, if a finding is genuinely non-trivial, it could not have been derived from only trivial work.

I’ve found Terry’s law to be quite true and to generalize quite well to products of engineering. At the very least, believing that it is true can spur effort in seeking non-trivial insights or building non-trivial systems along the way. Accordingly, now that I am developing a non-trivial piece of software, I shall keep a running lognon-exhaustive of each (potentiallythe bar for what would seem non-trivial may grow over time alongside leverage) non-trivial piece of insight I’ve encountered or unit of effort that’s been produced along the way. I hope that this blog series will prove interesting, and perhaps insightful, to future readers, including myself.

May the Lord grant wisdom in this endeavor.

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