Mission High School junior Jamariae Speed works on a class assignment reviewing linear equations, slopes and reciprocals during Dayna Soares' Algebra II class at Mission High School on Tuesday, January 8, 2019 in San Francisco, Calif. (Photo By Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Two Black female high school students in New Orleans made a historic math discovery last week – one that mathematicians have failed to prove for upwards of 2,000 years.
Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, both students at St. Mary’s Academy, revealed they proved the Pythagorean Theorem during a groundbreaking presentation at the American Mathematical Society’s Annual Southeastern Conference last Saturday (March 18).
The two were the only high school students there, which made for a “really unparalleled feeling,” Calcea says, adding “you don’t see kids like us doing it,” according to W-WLTV.
“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,” Calcea said. “A lot of times you see this stuff, you don’t see kids like us doing it.”
Calcea and Ne’Kiya broke down their discovery to the outlet, while providing a refresher course on the Pythagorean Theorem.
Essentially, trigonometry is based on the Pythagoras’ Theorem (A^2 + B^2 = C^2), therefore using trigonometry to prove Pythagoras’ Theorem is what’s known as circular logic, or more simply: an idea that can’t prove itself.
Calcea And Ne’Kiya proved that the theorem can be proven without trigonometry, which was something mathematicians had previously deemed impossible.
The two high school seniors praised their school and teachers for pushing them to do the impossible.
“Our slogan is ‘No Excellence Without Hard Labor.’ So, they definitely push us,” Calcea said. “We have really great teachers,” Ne’Kiya added.
Perhaps the pair will set their sights on solving more unproven math theories, which could net them so major money should they successfully do so.
Today’s mathematicians would probably agree that the Riemann Hypothesis is the most significant open problem in all of math.
It’s one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, with $1 million reward for its solution, according to Popular Mechanics.
The six other problems, which were announced in 2000, are the P versus NP problem, Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, Hodge conjecture, Navier-Stokes equation, Yang-Mills theory, and Poincaré conjecture.
