The bright minds of Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson have accomplished a new feat!
As AFROTECH™ previously reported, the duo made headlines in 2023 for proving the Pythagorean Theorem without circular logic. The theorem had not yet been proven by mathematicians in more than 2,000 years.
“Calcea and Ne’Kiya explained it to me like this: Basically, trigonometry is based on Pythagoras’ Theorem (A^2 + B^2 = C^2, sound familiar?), so using trigonometry to prove Pythagoras’s Theorem is what’s known as circular logic,” a WWL-TV reporter said at the time.
Their discovery occurred during a school math contest created by the pair’s high school math teacher, Mr. Rich, at St. Mary’s Academy, in New Orleans, LA, an academic paper states. The contest included a $500 prize.
“There was a bonus question that was to create a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem,” Johnson told PEOPLE. “Ne’Kiya and I were the only two to do the bonus question in the whole school.”
They presented their results to the American Mathematical Society’s Southeastern Sectional conference held in March 2023.
Now the prodigies are college students and have shared details of their proof in addition to nine more, CNN notes. Following their participation in the math conference, the pair was encouraged to release an academic paper on their discovery, which was published on Oct. 28, 2024, in American Mathematical Monthly, a scientific journal.
“Mr. Rich, a math volunteer at our high school, believed our proofs were novel enough to be presented at a mathematical conference. Neither of us had such confidence in our work at that point, but we decided to go along with it anyway,” a statement in the academic paper read. “This is when we began to work together. For the next two to three months, we spent all of our free time perfecting and polishing our work. We worked both independently and together after school, on weekends, and even during holidays. In the process, with Mr. Rich as our faculty advisor, we created additional proofs. We did all of this not knowing if we would even be allowed to present at the conference, which is usually only done by professional mathematicians, and occasionally college students.”
“I’m so surprised that we’re getting published in a paper at such a young age,” Johnson, a Louisiana State University student pursuing environmental engineering, explained in a video shared by the journal.
Jackson, an Xavier University student seeking to obtain a doctoral degree in pharmacy, added, “I didn’t think it would go this far.”
