High School Seniors in New Orleans Solved a 2,000-Year-Old Mathematical Problem
Kids today, huh?
And I mean that in a good way! An EXTREMELY good way!
Because if the majority of kids are anything like these two high school girls from New Orleans, the future is looking bright!
Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson are Seniors at St. Mary’s Dominican High School in New Orleans and they recently presented new proof for a 2,000-year-old mathematical theorem known as the Pythagorean theorem…which you might remember from your school days.
New Orleans students Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson say they've proved Pythagoras' Theorem — something academics have thought was impossible for 2,000 years.
Now, @amermathsoc is encouraging them to submit their work to a peer-reviewed journal.
— POCIT (@pocintech) March 27, 2023
Johnson and Jackson were the only two high schoolers to present at the conference, which included math researchers from major universities across the United States.
The theorem has been judged to be impossible by academics for 2,000 years, but Johnson and Jackson presented their finding at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society’s south-eastern chapter in Georgia.
In the abstract of their lecture, the duo state, “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.”
Photo Credit: YouTube
Johnson 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.”
Here’s a news video about the historic find.
How about a round of applause for these two young ladies?!?!
