Posted on 05/31/2012 2:07:01 PM PDT by South40
DRESDEN, Germany – A German 16-year-old has become the first person to solve a mathematical problem posed by Sir Isaac Newton more than 300 years ago.
Shouryya Ray worked out how to calculate exactly the path of a projectile under gravity and subject to air resistance, The (London) Sunday Times reported.
The Indian-born teen said he solved the problem that had stumped mathematicians for centuries while working on a school project.
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."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Over / under...split the difference
After many, many years, I finally looked up the definition of “point blank range”.
Man you’re lucky..........
Ç: alt-128
ü: alt-129
é: alt-130
â: alt-131
ä: alt-132
à: alt-133
å: alt-134
ç: alt-135
ê: alt-136
ë: alt-137
è: alt-138
(Or you can just buy a Canadian computer and toggle the keyboard between English & French)
Wow....if this kid was in an American school...the jocks would beat him up for being a NERD....and the school would say it was HIS fault!!
Amazing what you encounter on Free Republic.
In retrospect, I should have not responded until I was positive of the punctuation.
Thanks again!
Elegant. Looks like plug in the values and solve.
I dont see his computational allowances for the dimples on golf balls or the fuzz on tennis balls??
And it turns out to have been junk journalism.
(link is in Spanish, try opening with Chrome and use auto-translate)
Useless French degree to the rescue!
naiveté
The second "e" has an accent aigu or acute accent. You can type it by turning on "Num Luck," holding down the "Alt" key and typing "0233" on the numeric keypad. My otherwise useless French degree knowledge is always available here at FR should you have any more French typographical questions.
Thank you very much.
Of course, “Num Luck” should be “Num Lock” (in case you’re still looking.) But, hey, what would you expect from a Liberal Arts major?
I would also like to have some notation info’ It looks like the one constant is alpha and two other variables must have same dimensions. Of especial interest is the use of an arcsign value. Not being a math historian I wonder when arc trig values were developed.
While I do not have a degree in French, I disovered that I could skate all the way through high school and college by substituting 2 credits of a foreign language for every 1 credit of math.
Did I choose a useful language? No, I chose French.
Skated all the way with nothing beyond Algebra I.
I do have both accounting and finance secondary degrees, neither of which employ much "math".
One of the most frustrating parts of my year in Turkey as a visiting professor was that Turkish computer keyboards are almost like American ones, but not quite. I'd be typing along and suddenly a strange character would appear on the screen because I'd forgotten that Turkish has some characters English doesn't.
From "The Handbook of Mathematical Functions" pages 79 and 1045, the term "arc" indicates an "inverse circular function," extending to arcsin, arccos, arctan, arccot, arcsec, and arccsc.
Place an "h" at the end of each, and we have the inverse hyperbolic functions: (arcsinh, for instance).
Also ... "The inverse circular functions are also written"... arcsin z = sin-1 z
... and etc.
The kid is, apparently, highly intelligent.
The WW-II and Korean era ships used mechanical computers along with radar inputs and “stable element” gyroscopes to aim guns. Missiles hadn’t arrived yet.
Ahh.. Good ole Trig. The reason I would never be successful as an engineer or physicist and why I chose to be an economist/econometrician.
No trig beyond the pure math classes I have to take and then I can memorize the angle formulas, unit circle, derivatives, integrals, etc. and call it a day. Never have to use it in my actual profession thank god.
In regards to the solution, I am assuming that g = gravity, alpha = constant, v = velocity but what is u? Remember, all of my math has been applied to economics and finance NOT physics. In fact, I haven’t taken physics since high school haha.
It would make a pretty interesting book to put together all the ingenious solutions people have come up with over the years to solve this problem.
LOL- a very common help call I get from my clients are about their keyboard “malfunctioning”; it’s easy to inadvertently change the language setting but it isn’t obvious after you’ve done so.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.