Teen Math Whizzes Go Euclid One Better
By Gautam Nair
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
December 9, 1996
The scholarly journal Mathematics Teacher has churned out some 7,500 articles
published over the past nine decades. This month, Volume 90, issue No. 1 will
feature a first: a formal math treatise by two high school students.
Using simple computer software and a charming mix of ingenuity and naivete,
the two Connecticut teenagers have stumbled on what appears to be the first
new way to solve a problem that the Greek mathematician Euclid first posed and
answered more than 2,000 years ago.
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the article goes on - it's rather long. I hesitate to post the entire thing
for that reason. It notes that the students used technology to discover the
method! (which is to divide a line segment into any given number of equal length
segments).
I did put the Wall Street Journal article on a web page, at the following
rather long address - part of our department's site.
http://www.mcc.mass.edu/Mccweb/Programs/DEPARTMENTS/
MST/MATH/Math_Whiz_Kids.html
And the NCTM put the Math Teacher article on their site www.nctm.org I
think.
Phil Mahler
Middlesex CC
Bedford, MA