Two high school students solve math puzzle thought to be impossible for 2,000 years
Britt Jones
Featured Image Credit: 60 Minutes
If you thought you were smart, you’re not as smart as these two teenagers.
There has been buzz online and in the math community over an astounding breakthrough from an unlikely source.
I always thought high school math was the hardest it would get and couldn’t fathom anything more difficult than calculus, but these two girls knocked my embarrassing grades out of the park.
Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson are both whiz kids, as they have proven the Pythagoras’ theorem by using trigonometry.
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'What's so special about that?' you may ask. Well, it’s literally stumped academics for thousands of years.
The students of St Mary’s Academy, New Orleans, are now being encouraged by a prominent US math research organization to submit their work to a peer-reviewed journal. It’s just that good.
Johnson and Jackson attended the American Mathematical Society south-eastern chapter’s semi-annual meeting in Georgia, where they revealed their findings to the group.
This meeting was attended by math researchers from many US universities such as Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana State, Ohio State and Oklahoma and the girls were the only two high schoolers in attendance.
I’d be embarrassed if I was a top scholar and was outsmarted by kids, honestly.
During their speech, Johnson and Jackson spoke about how they discovered new proof for the Pythagorean theorem.
But what is it?
Let’s dumb it down:
The theorem is 2,000 years old and established the sum of the squares of a right triangle’s two shorter sides equals the exact same of the square of the hypotenuse.
That’s confusing…
It has always been argued that any proof based on trigonometry would need to the circular, but the schoolgirls denied this as truth.
Instead, 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."
Johnson and Jackson have been speaking to local media in recent days, including local TV news station WWL, where Johnson said it was an 'unparalleled feeling' to present her work alongside Jackson with 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."
Jackson went on to shout out her school teachers for challenging them to complete something that has previously been deemed impossible.