I don't know what this means. I'm not ashamed to say it. I'm not good at math. I didn't like it and was not innately good at it.
So I've always been impressed with people who can do math well. It's neat to see.
But this — this is on another level.
Two New Orleans high school seniors claim to have solved the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry — a method academics have held to be a logical impossibility for nearly two thousand years.
"Solved the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry." Again, I'm not really sure what that means.
[Editor's Note: You can find the length of the third side of a right triangle using Pythagorean's formula a^2 + b^2 = c^2. Harambe does his best for a gorilla, but he's too busy enjoying heaven to bother with math these days. I've made an illustration for you below.]
The most learned minds in the field, after all, believed that what these two young ladies did was straight-up impossible. Their school, St. Mary's Academy, noted on Instagram that "the largest known collection of proofs" argues that a trigonometric Pythagorean proof is nonexistent because it would end up being circular.
[Another editor's note: All of trigonometry is based on Pythagorus' work with geometry and triangles, so proving the thing with the thing itself is an insane feat.]
Apparently they were wrong. These scholars managed to develop four brand-new proofs to this two-millennia-old puzzle without going in circles.
Johnson and Jackson claimed to have found four new proofs to the theorem without committing a circular fallacy. Prominent researchers at the American Mathematical Society were so astonished that they are encouraging the pair of high schoolers to submit their work to a peer-reviewed journal to confirm the discovery.
Their justifiable happiness at cracking this code is obvious:
"It's really an unparalleled feeling," Johnson told WWL. "There's just nothing like being able to do something that people don't think young people can do. A lot of times you see this stuff, you don't see kids like us doing it."
