Two teenagers provide historic new proof for a 2,000-year-old math theorem
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: WWLTV
If like me you were not the best at math at school, you may want to get some tips from these two teenage girls.
To say that Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson are both wiz kids is certainly an understatement, as they have proven the Pythagoras’ theorem by using trigonometry.
'What's so special about that?' you may ask. Well, for thousands of years, academics looking into the theorem have thought it to be impossible.
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Now, the students of St Mary’s Academy, New Orleans, are being encouraged by a prominent US math research organization to submit their impressive work to a peer-reviewed journal.
Recently, Johnson and Jackson attended the American Mathematical Society south-eastern chapter’s semi-annual meeting in Georgia, where they revealed their findings.
At the meeting - which was attended by math researchers from many US universities such as Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana State, Ohio State and Oklahoma - the girls were the only two high schoolers in attendance.
During their speech, Johnson and Jackson spoke about how they have discovered new proof for the Pythagorean theorem, which will have certainly shocked academics.
Many of you are probably wondering what exactly this theory is all about, so let us explain.
The theorem, which is actually a staggering 2,000 years old, established the sum of the squares of a right triangle’s two shorter sides equals the exact same of the square of the hypotenuse.
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In its long history, it has always been argued that any proof based on trigonometry would need to the circular, but the school girls refuted this.
In an abstract for their presentation, Johnson and Jackson said: "In our lecture we present a new proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem which is based on a fundamental result in trigonometry—the Law of Sines—and we show that the proof is independent of the Pythagorean trig identity \sin^2x + \cos^2x = 1."
Following their historic presentation, the two school girls have been speaking to the media.
Speaking to local TV news station WWL, Johnson said it was an 'unparalleled feeling' to present her work alongside Jackson with a bunch of people that are a lot more experienced than them standing alongside.
She said: "There’s nothing like it – being able to do something that people don’t think that young people can do.
"You don’t see kids like us doing this – it’s usually, like, you have to be an adult to do this."
Meanwhile, Jackson praised her school teachers for challenging them to complete something that has previously been deemed impossible.