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posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 06 2020, @03:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the math-simplified dept.

Math Genius Has Come Up With a Wildly Simple New Way to Solve Quadratic Equations:

If you studied algebra in high school (or you're learning it right now), there's a good chance you're familiar with the quadratic formula. If not, it's possible you repressed it.

By this point, billions of us have had to learn, memorise, and implement this unwieldy algorithm in order to solve quadratic equations, but according to mathematician Po-Shen Loh from Carnegie Mellon University, there's actually been an easier and better way all along, although it's remained almost entirely hidden for thousands of years.

In a 2019 research paper, Loh celebrates the quadratic formula as a "remarkable triumph of early mathematicians" dating back to the beginnings of the Old Babylonian Period around 2000 BCE, but also freely acknowledges some of its ancient shortcomings.

"It is unfortunate that for billions of people worldwide, the quadratic formula is also their first (and perhaps only) experience of a rather complicated formula which they must memorise," Loh writes.

[...] We still don't know how this escaped wider notice for millennia, but if Loh's instincts are right, maths textbooks could be on the verge of a historic rewriting - and we don't take textbook-changing discoveries lightly.

"I wanted to share it as widely as possible with the world," Loh says, "because it can demystify a complicated part of maths that makes many people feel that maybe maths is not for them."

The research paper is available at pre-print website arXiv.org, and you can read Po-Shen Loh's generalised explanation of the simple proof here.


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  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday July 06 2020, @05:45PM (4 children)

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Monday July 06 2020, @05:45PM (#1017186) Homepage Journal

    If I could have lived the rest of my life without hearing the words "Quadratic equation", i would've been much happier.

    For me, the quadratic equation made no sense. I remember staying up from after school till going to bed, trying to solve four problems. I even went in to get help during study hall and after school and the teacher couldn't figure it out either (God bless her heart for trying so hard). Now I have to repress all those horrible memories again.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @05:58PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @05:58PM (#1017199)

    The next time you drive a car look at the speedometer. It's a Quadratic equation calculator. Now you have something to always remind you of the happy times in school.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @09:19PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @09:19PM (#1017324)

      > The next time you drive a car..

      Probably not for newer cars--they count pulses on a tone wheel in the transmission (geared to the final drive) and divide by the time. All very linear (and done digitally).

      Previous generation of speedometers used eddy current "motors" to move the pointer,
          https://www.explainthatstuff.com/how-speedometer-works.html [explainthatstuff.com] which are linear analog devices, depending on Kx for the hairspring constant.

      There is a brief mention that some early speedometers used something like a centrifugal governor--and since centrifugal/centripetal force is a function of V^2 those ancient speedometers solved a quadratic, but just the most simple kind (x^-2), no linear or constant term. Don't recall seeing one of these, they might have solved the square root with a nonlinear readout scale?

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 06 2020, @07:35PM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday July 06 2020, @07:35PM (#1017257)

    Graphing parabolas might have helped - your solutions are the X axis intercepts - if this is all too much, just stay away, it's not a big part of daily life for most people.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:56PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:56PM (#1017597)

      maybe if the ignorant were properly shamed for being ignorant, and forced to learn some math, we wouldn't be in the situation when "exponential growth" is a crucial notion that people can't understand.