Let me just begin this post by saying that I detest math. I’m not good at it and lucky for me, I don’t need to be. Having said that, this story from Sweden puts a smile on my face.

A 16 year-old Iraqi immigrant living in Sweden named Mohamed Altoumaimi has solved out a math problem that has vexed the best mathematics minds for 300 years. It took him about four months. What he did was come up with a formula that explains and simplifies the “Bernoulli numbers.”

I did a little digging and found this from a math Web site:
The Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of signed rational numbers that can be defined by the identity. These numbers arise in the series expansions of trigonometric functions, and are extremely important in number theory and analysis.

So, yeah. They lost me at “sequence.” I don’t even like dumb-dumb type math, so the Bernoulli numbers may as well be Sanskrit to me. But this Iraqi whiz-kid sure knew enough, even though his teachers were skeptical at first. Since he couldn’t get any support at his own school, he sent his work to professors at Uppsala University in Sweden and they confirmed his result. Not only that, they offered him immediate entry into their University, which Altoumaimi refused (at least initially).

He plans to do a little instruction in the coming months as well as working on “advanced math and physics” over the summer. Altoumaimi said that he has to “get better at English and social science.” But here’s a little advice from Uncle Chuck… no you don’t. If you’re solving the Bernoulli numbers at 16, then you don’t ever need to pick up an English book again. Well done, kiddo.

UPDATE: Apparently there’s some issue with what he did and did not accomplish with the formula.

Read up so you can be smart like him:
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