eli5: I saw an article that said two teenagers made a discovery of trigonometric proof for the pythagorean theorem. What does that mean and why is it important?
In: Mathematics
While it’s very impressive, and two high school teens should absolutely be celebrated for such an accomplishment, it’s more of a mathematical curiosity. It doesn’t have like a significant impact. I don’t say that to diminish their achievement, just noting it’s not like a revolution that challenges the world.
The gist is that, for 2000+ years it was assumed that a trigonometric proof of the theorem is going to boil down to using laws that are in some way *derived* from the Pythagorean theorem. You can’t use the premise in a proof like this. Through some law of sines shenanigans apparently they’ve discovered a succinct proof that *doesnt* violate this. Notable mathematicians have historically been cited as commenting offhand “it shouldn’t be possible”, but these two figured out a method that hadn’t occurred to anyone. I also read they’ve extended the technique to other “missing” classic proofs.
Neither is pursuing math in university! Hopefully they’ll go on to be titans in their fields, whatever they do.
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