Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson presented their findings on March 18
Two American high school students stunned mathematicians after claiming they had found a new way to prove the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry—a feat that mathematicians thought was impossible. Guardianinformed of.
Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, seniors at Saint Mary’s Academy in New Orleans, presented their findings March 18 at the American Mathematical Society (AMS) Spring Southeastern Sectional Meeting.
His important lecture from research is historical. High school students are not typically presenters at American Mathematical Society meetings,” the school’s announcement notes.
Specifically, the 2,000-year-old Pythagorean theorem states that while the sum of the squares of the two smaller sides of a right-angled triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse, the third side is opposite the right angle. Students all over the world learned the notation expressing the principle as a2+b2=c2. However, mathematicians have struggled to find a definitive proof for the theorem that would not only show that it works but explain why it does.
“In the 2000 years since the discovery of trigonometry, it has always been assumed that any purported proof of Pythagoras’ theorem based on trigonometry must be spherical,” he told the audience at the American Mathematical Society Southeastern Regional Conference.
“Indeed, in the book containing the largest known collection of proofs (pythagorean proposition by Elisha Loomis) the author explicitly states that ‘there are no trigonometric proofs because all the fundamental formulas of trigonometry are based on the truth of the Pythagorean theorem itself.’
students further said that can prove the theorem using trigonometry And without circular reasoning.
But “this is not true at all,” the teen wrote in the abstract. “We present a new proof of Pythagoras’ 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 triangle identity sin2x+cos2x=1.”
However, the findings have not yet been accepted in a peer-reviewed journal. According to live scienceIt is still too early to say whether his credentials will ultimately hold up.