Past open problems with sudden and easy-to-understand solutions What are some examples of mathematical facts that had once been open problems for a significant amount of time and thought hard or unsolvable by contemporary methods, but were then unexpectedly solved thanks to some out-of-the-box flash of genius, and the proof is actually short (say, one page or so) and uses elementary mathematics only?

Our complex analysis professor told us that huge amounts of literature was written studying analytic functions that are bounded. Then came https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liouville%27s_theorem_(complex_analysis) like a hammer. Super easy proof, (according to my professor) very unexpected result at the time.
I haven't found a verification of this anecdote, but fun story in any case.
