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I've always wondered if it's possible to harness teen minds to solve significant math problems in high school, if you formulated them well and found the right scope. I think it's possible.

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cevi 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

MIT's PRIMES program does exactly this - they give advanced high school students a mentor who picks out a problem, gets them up to speed on what is known, and then they work on the problem for a year and publish their results. It tends to work best with problems which have a computational aspect, so that the students can get some calculations done on the computer to get the ball rolling.

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afry1 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is very possible!

Just this year these girls discovered a proof for the Pythagorean theorem using nothing but trigonometry, a feat considered impossible until they did it: https://youtu.be/VHeWndnHuQs

	▲	SJC_Hacker 10 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Unfortunately it seems their proof already had the Pythagorean Theorem embedded within its implicit assumptions - they define measure of an angle through rotation of a circle. They don't explicitly define circle, but from their diagram they hint at the "understood" definition, namely a set of points equidistance from a central point, while using Euclidean distance as the metric.
	▲	thaumasiotes 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> a feat considered impossible until they did it Hm? https://www.cut-the-knot.org/pythagoras/TrigProof.shtml > J. Zimba, On the Possibility of Trigonometric Proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem, Forum Geometricorum, Volume 9 (2009) And Zimba's proof terminates in a finite number of steps.

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colordrops 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes that's the education system. But I suspect you mean in some automated turk fashion.

	▲	julianeon 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry, I meant while they were still in high school; I've edited my original comment to make that clear.

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znyboy 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Monkeys with typewriters, or teenagers with MacBooks?