It was not the MIT or Harvard: These high school students discovered a proof to a theorem that might change math

Two teenage girls have 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.

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.”

Related stories

Society

Watch out for the ‘one-ring-and-cut’ telephone scam

CINEMA

Heartbreak at Kim Sae-ron’s tragic passing

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.

Get your game on! Whether you’re into NFL touchdowns, NBA buzzer-beaters, world-class soccer goals, or MLB home runs, our app has it all. Dive into live coverage, expert insights, breaking news, exclusive videos, and more – plus, stay updated on the latest in current affairs and entertainment. Download now for all-access coverage, right at your fingertips – anytime, anywhere.