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350-Year-Old Newton's Puzzle Solved By 16-Year-Old
First time accepted submitter johnsnails writes "A German 16-year-old, Shouryya Ray, solved two fundamental particle dynamic theories posed by Sir Isaac Newton, which until recently required the use of powerful computers. He worked out how to calculate exactly the path of a projectile under gravity and subject to air resistance. Shouryya solved the problem while working on a school project. From the article: 'Mr Ray won a research award for his efforts and has been labeled a genius by the German media, but he put it down to "curiosity and schoolboy naivety." "When it was explained to us that the problems had no solutions, I thought to myself, 'well, there's no harm in trying,'" he said.'"
We all had that moment in school when a teacher would pose an "impossible" problem, thought to ourselves "Well, they've never faced ME before!", spent a few minutes toying with it and finally giving up. This kid...did not.
Kudos all around! The rest of your life will, unfortunately, now no longer live up to something you accomplished when you were 16.
The article itself is mathless. It doesn't tell you what the solution was, or even present the exact problem that was solved.
And running a search for the kid's name turns up the same article fifty fucking times over. Google did some work on link farms... they need to do some work deduping / despamming press releases.
The problem he solved is determining the exact path of a projectile, when accounting for air resistance. The drag coefficient for air resistance depends nonlinearly on velocity, so when it is included in the model the equations become difficult to solve (previously impossible, but apparently now done. Though I haven't found any links to his actual work). Here is an example of setting up the problem, and then solving it numerically.
The problems he solved are not NP. They are essentially calculus, but they are both very nasty calc problems, and the traditional way to solve calc problems is using newton approximations until the answer is close enough to what you want. An analytical / precise way to solve these problems is extremely useful to the physics folks, as the solution will probably also lead to better models of particle motion.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
On a sad note, he only placed 2nd in the overall competition :(
Andrew Wiles solved Fermat's Last Theorm with paper only, as he despised the use of computers in writing mathematical Proofs. Another famous example is Grigori Perelman who solved the Poincaré Conjecture - with hundreds and hundreds of pages of mind-numbingly dense mathematics vs computer search.
Number one cured cancer AND solved the world's energy problem. That's hard to top. :)
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I was not a prodigy, but a really smart kid who was in many environments with prodigies or near prodigies.
My experience has been that most pre-teen children with this history don't understand the material very well, and there tends to be a lot of exaggeration about it. Smart kids are good at mimicking things and that is all that is really need to "do" the first year or two of college math.
Occasionally, but very occasionally you get someone really young who later goes on to do decent, or even more rarely great things, like Norbert Wiener or Terry Tao. But I would like to hear those people give their opinions of the depth of their understanding at that age.
I knew Nadine Kowalsky, who in HS would essentially just remember everything she heard in class and got 100 on every exam. (She wasn't the only one though. I knew a number of other people like that though that didn't do as well as Nadine did.) She later went on to get a Ph.D. from Chicago and published her thesis in the Annals of Math. That is a journal most mathematicians can't get a paper in. Like publishing in Nature or Science. Nadine was the real deal, but sadly she died of cancer not long after finishing her Ph.D. But I don't believe that Nadine was doing calculus until she was 15. And that was certainly on purpose. She, and her parents apparently, knew what was a good idea to do, and not to do, with a super smart kid. (This last sentence is conjecture on my part.)
But I think most cases of pre-teens you hear about are really not what they are made out to be. Once you get to 12 or 13 those, I think things do change a lot.
Exactly. As a kid, I had a dog that understood when I threw a ball up on the roof of our garage, which caused it to disappear from her sight, that it would roll along the slope of the roof and and reappear further down the roofline. She actually got fairly good at predicting where the ball would reappear, repositioning herself along its path over time so she would meet it at its eventual drop point. Does that mean my dog understood calculus, or solved Newton's problem? Well, she recognized a pattern and was able to apply a repeatable solution.
That tells me that the brain is capable of recognizing complex patterns around us, and is actually already very capable of deriving and applying practical solutions. ("So easy a dog could do it.") Applying abstract mathematical models to them, however, is not so easy.
What I'd be most interested in in this whole saga is "what methods did his father use to teach him math?" Obviously they were highly effective.
John