Trivial problems and mathematical trivia

If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can’t solve: find it.

– Conway misquoting Pólya

Open problems in mathematics drive research and motivate the discovery of new tools and ideas. In this talk, I discussed some open problems chosen from diverse areas of mathematics and gave some context for why they are interesting or important. The focus was on problems that are perhaps underappreciated outside their immediate field, rather than well-known examples.

Mixed in with the open problems were a scattering of known results with short, not-too-technical proofs. It was up to the audience to identify and provide proofs for these `trivial’ results.

Here are the materials I compiled, caveat lector.