Mathematics

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd says he would've solved it but his pencil ran outta lead...

Teen solves centuries-old math problem
May 23 (UPI) -- A 16-year-old in Germany who solved a centuries-old math problem credited his accomplishment to "schoolboy naivety."

Shouryya Ray, whose family moved from India to Dresden when he was 12, solved a pair of fundamental particle dynamics problems posed by Isaac Newton more than 350 years ago to make it possible to calculate the flight path of a ball and predict how it will hit and bounce off a wall, The Local.de reported Wednesday.

Ray said he learned about the problems when his school, which specializes in science, sent his 11th grade class to the Technical University in Dresden. The teenager said his "schoolboy naivety" would not allow him to accept that the problems couldn't be solved. "I asked myself: why can't it work?" he told the Die Welt newspaper.

Ray said he is currently deciding whether to study math or physics when he moves on to college.

Read more: Teen solves centuries-old math problem - UPI.com

 

[g5000]

Well done, kid!

 

[gxnelson]

bravo. This is math/education/thinking done right.

 

[Mr. H.]

Mathematician's Century-Old Secrets Unlocked - Yahoo! News

While on his death bed, the brilliant Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan cryptically wrote down functions he said came to him in dreams, with a hunch about how they behaved. Now 100 years later, researchers say they've proved he was right.

"We've solved the problems from his last mysterious letters. For people who work in this area of math, the problem has been open for 90 years," Emory University mathematician Ken Ono said.

Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician born in a rural village in South India, spent so much time thinking about math that he flunked out of college in India twice, Ono said.

More at the link...

 

[blimpo]

Let's solve this.