How two New Orleans teens solved a math puzzle that stumped experts for thousands of years
Two Louisiana students have found a proof to a theorem that has shaken the foundations of mathematics.
Two teenage girls cracked a mathematical code that has stood for thousands of years: Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson, solved the argument while seniors at St. Mary’s Academy in New Orleans which stated that Pythagoras’ theorem could not be proved by trigonometry.
It was previously believed that trigonometry, using sine, cosine, or tangent, to verify Pythagoras’ theorem (a2 + b2 = c2) was thought to be an ultimately cyclical argument as the former is itself built upon the latter.
Thousands of years, thousands of minds and thousands of proofs, ranging from Euclid to modern algebraic approaches, all seemingly led to one conclusion. Until now.
Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson‘s trigonometric proof
After four years of research, Jackson and Johnson revealed their findings at the Mathematical Association of America‘s annual conference in Atlanta.
They presented a trigonometric proof that avoids traditional foundations of sine and cosine, removing the need to depend on Pythagoras’ theorem. They broke free of the ideological constraints by utilising on fundamental angle properties and proportional reasoning, filling one larger triangle with an infinite sequence of smaller triangles and use calculus to find the lengths of the larger triangle’s sides.
Praise came in immediately from all sides towards the pair, with some describing the breakthrough as ‘game changing’; their work was also fast-tracked for publication in the prestigious American Mathematical Monthly.
“Some people have the impression that you have to be in academia for years and years before you can actually produce some new mathematics,” mathematician Álvaro Lozano-Robledo of the University of Connecticut told ScienceNews. But Jackson and Johnson demonstrate that “you can make a splash even as a high school student.”
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And there’s more: after breaking new ground with their discovery, the pair quickly found further proofs. “We found five, and then we found a general format that could potentially produce at least five additional proofs,” Calcea Johnson revealed to CBS’s 60 Minutes.
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