How two high school students solved a 2,000-year-old math puzzle
By Bill Whitaker , Aliza Chasan , Sara Kuzmarov, Mariah Campbell
A high school math teacher at St. Mary's Academy in New Orleans, Michelle Blouin Williams, was looking for ingenuity when she and her colleagues set a school-wide math contest with a challenging bonus question. That bonus question asked students to create a new proof for the Pythagorean Theorem, a fundamental principle of geometry, using trigonometry. The teachers weren't necessarily expecting anyone to solve it, as proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem using trigonometry were believed to be impossible for nearly 2,000 years.
But then, in December 2022, Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson, seniors at St. Mary's Academy, stepped up to the challenge. The $500 prize money was a motivating factor.
After months of work, they submitted their innovative proofs to their teachers. With the contest behind them, their teachers encouraged the students to present at a mathematics conference, and then to seek to publish their work. And even today, they're not done. Now in college, they've been working on further proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem and believe they have found five more proofs. Amazingly, despite their impressive achievements, they insist they're not math geniuses.
