Two students from St. Mary’s Academy have managed to outsmart mathematicians who lived over the past 2,000 years.
Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson were recent speakers at the Annual Southeastern Conference of the American Mathematical Society. They claim to have demonstrated the impossibility of using trigonometry to verify the Pythagorean Theorem.
Not surprisingly, they were the only high school students in the room.
As Johnson said, “it’s really an incomparable feeling, to be honest, because there’s just nothing quite like being able to do something that people think young people can’t do.” She continued, “a lot of times you see this stuff, you don’t see kids like us doing it.”
Johnson explained, “our slogan is ‘No excellence without hard work’. So they’re definitely pushing us,”
“We have really great teachers,” Jackson added.
