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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 VLM on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:56PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:56PM (#1017673)

    My classmates who only had the mediocre teachers

    Its worth pointing out that my wife could handle math so she did STEM degree so I eventually met her at a STEM employer and eventually married etc. Meanwhile my SiL couldn't handle math, so she went for a K12 educator degree instead of STEM, and she's been teaching math to the next generation of STEM students for more than a quarter century. So the sister who knows math designs and implements the call center queuing statistical analysis formulas in your PBX firmware, but doesn't teach anyone math, whereas the sister who couldn't learn math is teaching math. Hmm.

    Given the extreme income disparity between something like a BSEd vs BSCS or BSEE, I would think anyone who can pass calculus is almost certainly not teaching kids math, which in the long term would seem to be a problem for the next generation of calculus learners.

    I'm not sure if its good or bad news that the district curriculum is so detailed and specific that she's practically reading prepared materials to the kids or showing approved multimedia all day rather than actually teaching in the traditional sense of 1 on 1 learning. In a similar sense I don't know anything about playing Rugby, but given an authoritarian micromanaged enough school district curriculum I could "teach" rugby by word for word reading of the school district issued mandatory rugby textbook, and accidentally some kids might learn rugby from "me" in the sense that they heard me create a live audiobook presentation of the textbook they probably wouldn't read on their own without me crack'n the whip on them.

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