Examples of famous problems resolved easily Have there been examples of seemingly long standing hard problems, answered quite easily possibly with tools existing at the time the problems were made? More modern examples would be nice. An example could be Hilbert's basis theorem. Another could be Dwork's p-adic technique for rationality of zeta functions from algebraic varieties.

Van der Waerden's conjecture on the permanent of a doubly stochastic matrix, proved independently by Falikmann & Egorychev. It turned out to be an easy consequence of an inequality which had been known for a long time.
