In high school we were learning about arithmetic sums. I quickly realized it was basically the same thing as finding the area of a right triangle. I noodled around with it in class until I sorta got it to work. The next day, we would have a quiz that required us to memorize three different formulas.
That evening, I realized I could use my idea to combine all three formulas into a single one. It wasn’t easy. It took me all night. You guys should have seen it. It was beautiful. I was able to remove the trigonometry from the formula by using trig identities which we learned about a few weeks earlier in class, then a bunch of algebra to simplify.
I hit a snag where the formula wasn’t working even though I thought it should. I had a brilliant spark of intuition where I thought, “what if I add 1/2 the length of the opposite side of the triangle?” and it fucking WORKED. I just chalked it up to the power of intuition and didn’t try to figure out why lol.
Anyway, go take the quiz, get done blazingly fast, turn it in. I was twiddling my thumbs waiting for my classmates to finish when my teacher just stands up in front of everyone and says “Uh, chunes, what is this?” and holds up my test. So I sheepishly reply “Oh, well I didn’t want to memorize three formulas so I combined them into one. I have my work here if you want to look at it.”
So she took my work and said she wanted to do induction on it to see if it really works and stuff. My classmates must have thought I was some kind of turbo-nerd. Thing is, I didn’t even like math that much. It was just one of those things.
Sadly, I lost my work like a dumbass and I can’t remember the formula anymore. Pretty irritating
In high school we were learning about arithmetic sums. I quickly realized it was basically the same thing as finding the area of a right triangle. I noodled around with it in class until I sorta got it to work. The next day, we would have a quiz that required us to memorize three different formulas.
That evening, I realized I could use my idea to combine all three formulas into a single one. It wasn’t easy. It took me all night. You guys should have seen it. It was beautiful. I was able to remove the trigonometry from the formula by using trig identities which we learned about a few weeks earlier in class, then a bunch of algebra to simplify.
I hit a snag where the formula wasn’t working even though I thought it should. I had a brilliant spark of intuition where I thought, “what if I add 1/2 the length of the opposite side of the triangle?” and it fucking WORKED. I just chalked it up to the power of intuition and didn’t try to figure out why lol.
Anyway, go take the quiz, get done blazingly fast, turn it in. I was twiddling my thumbs waiting for my classmates to finish when my teacher just stands up in front of everyone and says “Uh, chunes, what is this?” and holds up my test. So I sheepishly reply “Oh, well I didn’t want to memorize three formulas so I combined them into one. I have my work here if you want to look at it.”
So she took my work and said she wanted to do induction on it to see if it really works and stuff. My classmates must have thought I was some kind of turbo-nerd. Thing is, I didn’t even like math that much. It was just one of those things.
Sadly, I lost my work like a dumbass and I can’t remember the formula anymore. Pretty irritating
Revisit your project.
Claim your place among the titans of mathematics!