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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 Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @10:09PM
I disagree on two axes:
1. I had the misfortune - long story - of attending a religious university and had mathematics and computer science professors that were technically brilliant but still devoutly religious. Being unable to understand math is unrelated to being irrational about bearded sky gods, vaccines, or the shape of the earth.
2. Some portion of the population is just plain stupid. I grant that. But many other people who are terrible at math just had a bad educational environment as children. If you spend a long time with someone and decide they're not too bright, that's fine. But if you are only acquainted with someone with poor math skills, you have to find out if their problem is innate stupidity or lack of opportunity. I have two anecdotes. First, one of my neighbors dropped out of high school at 16 to work construction. In his late 20s he decided he wanted a more interesting job so he got his GED, then his bachelor's degree, then a PhD in biochemistry and now he does cancer research. Second, one of my brothers had an elementary school teacher that beat the kids when they got a math problem wrong. (Hooray for religious schools.) He was traumatized by the abuse and barely passed math classes for the rest of his schooling - he could learn the material, but when it was test time he would freeze up. Ten years after high school and a lot of counseling and medication later he bought a book on high school math and worked through it, and took some college preparation standardized tests. He was the the only balding guy with a big beard in the room, and he scored in the top 5%.