Two Louisiana students claim to have found a new discovery for a math problem that has intrigued mathematicians for 2,000 years.
The pair recently presented their findings at the American Mathematical Society’s Annual Southeastern Conference.
“It’s really an unparalleled feeling, honestly, because there’s just nothing like being able to do something that people don’t think young people can do,” Johnson told the news station. “A lot of times you see this stuff, you don’t see kids like us doing it.”
But it has broadly been accepted that there is no way to define the theorem using trigonometry — which is what Jackson and Johnson claim they have now done.
In an abstract posted on the American Mathematical Society’s website, the two said they used theLaw of Sines— which is used to find angles of a general triangle — in their findings.
They continue: “But that isn’t quite true: 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.”
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According to Insider, academics have madesimilar claims.
PerThe Guardian, the American Mathematical Society’s Executive Director Catherine Roberts is encouraging the two teens to submit their findings to a peer-reviewed journal to “determine whether their proof is a correct contribution to the mathematics literature.”
“We encourage them to continue their studies in mathematics,” Roberts continued.
“Our slogan is ‘No Excellence Without Hard Labor,'” she shared. “So, they definitely push us.”
Jackson added: “We have really great teachers.”
source: people.com
