Kristine says:

This reminds me of something I did when I was a young kid. I remember when I was in the 1st or 2nd grade sitting on the floor in my grandfathers house asking him for all the answers to these math problems that I found. He was watching television and not paying attention to me and just rattling off the answers. I wrote them all down and brought it to school with me and showed my teacher what ‘I had done’. (This wasn’t a homework assignment or anything that would have advanced my grades by the way, just something I decided to do and don’t ask me why..) Well.. they thought it was the greatest thing and they ended up putting me in an accelerated math class for it. Which it turns out I did pretty ok with. However, I don’t think back then I was happy with what I had done since it got me so much more work!

Anyway, I can’t say whether this kid figured out the formula on his own or actually did reference it somewhere but it sure did remind me of my own history a little.

Ben says:

Ha Einstein has nothing on him. I’m actually pretty good at math but that went way over my head and into the pond.

Kristine says:

Hmm well my post is there today… I am very sure it wasn’t there yesterday. Quit messin’ with me :p

I had a friend in elementary school who was great at math, and I wasn’t all that bad, but we must’ve spent weeks trying to disprove the Pythagorean Theorem of right triangles. Eventually we drew one where we couldn’t get a^2 + b^2 to equal c^2, and we were sent to the principal who basically told us to just shut up and accept what we were being taught without questioning authority. Funny how I tend to be of a very opposite point of view these days..

P.S. My comments very often vanish after I hit ’submit’. I’ve discovered some of them having reappeared days later, but I have no idea why it happens.

A Million Heads Are Better Than One:

I would have to respectfully disagree with you there Chuck, Altoumaimi should continue his language and social studies. One of the most important parts of a discovery of any kind is the distribution and general availability of new information to others. Communication in the world of mathematics, and all branches of knowledge for that matter, is just as important as the results of discoveries themselves. For example, if Einstein spoke a language that no one understood, then we would not know the theory of general relativity. Sure, Einstein would understand the some of the most fundamental characteristics of our universe, but how does that further the scientific community when that knowledge is not shared. It doesn’t matter what one person knows, it matters what they know and how they can communicate what they know with others. The power of the sciences is the community; people collaborating, sharing their work with the one another only to further the community as a whole. If Altoumaimi is truly a math genius, paradoxically his most valuable tool may not be the scribbled equations that dissect the realms of mathematics, but rather the ways in which he can distribute his discoveries to the world.

First, stuff doesn’t disappear from your computer screen. Some programs clear the screen before putting up new versions. Then, when for any reason the operation is slowed down, you will observe a blank screen for some time.

Second. There are a multitude of math results which even professional mathematicians don’t recognize as “well known”. One or two isolate professionals who are surprised isn’t evidence of extraordinary talent. It takes patience to sort out talented individuals from the common herd. Someone who confesses a distaste for math is hardly qualified as an expert.

Relax and get back to your studies. Don’t indulge in pipe dreams of finding a phenomenon.