For many high school students, math class can be one of the most painful parts of their school day, full of complex equations with no real world applications. That’s why they make calculators, right?
But Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, students at St.Mary’s Academy in New Orleans, took on one of those complex equations and did something even some of the most renowned mathematicians thought was impossible – proved the Pythagorean Theorem using only trigonometry.
If you’re getting awful flashbacks of your high school math classes, we don’t blame you. But in case you need a refresher, the theorem, named after the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, is the equation used to calculate the longer side of a right triangle by adding the squares of the two shorter sides, or a2 + b2 = c2. And while there are over 300 proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem using algebra and…