41–50 of 287 posts
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What does this have to do with anything? Exceptional people come from absolutely anywhere, and seek to learn on their own. It's as true in Louisiana as it is in Massachusetts.
Ken Thompson was born and (at least partly, afaik) raised in Louisiana, for example. Are we all just dumb people using a dumb person's language and OS?
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There's no actual requirement for a proof to give you a "why." The steps just all have to be be logically correct and not accidentally, eg, assume what is to be proven. Lots of proofs are basically unhelpful at giving you a "why," that doesn't disqualify them from being a proof.
I was using Stanford’s definition. https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs103/cs103.1202/l...
The actual title is "Here’s How Two New Orleans Teenagers Found a New Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem" but I don't know why HN automatically converted it to this title.
"Here's How" is usually used for clickbait stuff and adds nothing of substance to the title itself. New Orleans Teenagers Found a New Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem is both shorter and less editorial than Here’s How Two New Orleans Teenagers Found a New Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem
HN automatically strips things like this on submission but you can edit the submission title after posting to put it back in when it's appropriate, as here.
In the first paragraph under “Deriving lengths of the sides of the smaller triangle”, how do we know the length of the third side is 2a^2/b ?
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"Here's How" is usually used for clickbait stuff and adds nothing of substance to the title itself. New Orleans Teenagers Found a New Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem is both shorter and less editorial than Here’s How Two New Orleans Teenagers Found a New Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem
I get why that's the default behavior but "adds nothing of substance" is a huge generalization that fails in this case. An article with zero details about the proof could easily be titled "New Orleans Teenagers Found a New Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem" but couldn't accurately be titled "Here’s How Two New Orleans Teenagers Found a New Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem." Whereas here it says it'll have more details…
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Yeah, they made a symmetry argument, a series expansion argument, and a law of sines argument. None of those require the Pythagorean Theorem and are all separately proven. There may be a reason that it's wrong (I'm not a mathematician but the article's author is). So, they showed why the sum of squares is true for the hypotenuse of a triangle. It's even an exact proof rather than a limit argument. That I could follow…
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And do re-read the article; the author is attempting to reconstruct their proof without seeing it. You're attacking the students without even seeing their work. Incomprehensible.
The relevant section is available as a pdf here: http://www.personal.psu.edu/mxl48/Welcome_files/Sample.pdf
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Can you elaborate on what is a proof in your opinion? Having a degree in applied physics and mathematics from MIPT I’m struggling to understand your point. It does look like a proof of the theorem to me.
https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs103/cs103.1202/l... I am using Stanford University’s definition.