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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.
(Score: 0) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:02AM (2 children)
Working with zero crossing (and hell, any threshold crossing) is everywhere in electronics. Sure, you can MATLAB it all away, but it helps to have a more intuitive understanding of the underlying math mechanisms.
But that's why that level of education is shit in America. The worst travesty of lower-level American education is that basic vectors are taught separately from complex numbers and when complex numbers are first taught there are no real-world applications taught with them. So students before the internet had their "what the fuck is this used for"-isms for complex numbers just like you had with root-finding in general.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:23AM
If only they would start with the axioms of set theory and get straight onto tensor calculus then we could derive the math test and solve it before it was even written. Bastards.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:43PM
Yeah but it never ends up as a quadratic eqn, or never seems to. Sure would be convenient, but...
Its always stuff like IC=beta(Vcc-Vbe)/RB or Is*exp[(VBE/VT)-1] or worse. Just plop it into SPICE or similar simulator and solve/simulate for zero voltage or whatever.