Two high school kids from New Orleans, Louisiana, Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, are said to have solved a “impossible” math problem and presented it at a recent conference where they were the only high schoolers.
The two St. Mary’s Academy pupils claimed to have used trigonometry without employing circular reasoning to demonstrate Pythagoras’s theorem.
For more over 2,000 years, various mathematicians around the world had held this discovery to be unattainable.
Most recently, they presented their work called “An Impossible Proof of Pythagoras” at the American Mathematical Society’s Southeastern Section’s semi-annual meeting at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
They were reportedly the only high schoolers at the event which was attended by math researchers from several institutions and universities across the country.
“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 WWLTV.
“A lot of times you see this stuff, you don’t see kids like us doing it.”
The two high school seniors claimed that it wasn’t possible without their teachers’ support and who instilled in them their school’s slogan “No Excellence Without Hard Labor,” in them.
Jackson remarked, “Our teachers are excellent.”
Additionally, Johnson and Jackson intend to enroll in college to pursue STEM degrees in biochemistry and environmental engineering.