Theme:
Mathematics
Content:
One of the oldest mathematical results we have as humans is the Pythagorean Theorem relating the lengths of the sides of a right triangle. In this presentation, we give a short proof of the Pythagorean Theorem and then explore some generalizations, leading to the statement of Beal's Conjecture, the solution of which is worth $1,000,000.
Why this is important?
We tend to think of mathematics as an area of human knowledge in which everything is already known, but this is far from the truth. By passing from the well known (in this case the Pythagorean Theorem) to the unknown (in this case Beal's Conjecture) in a few short minutes, I hope to inspire students to think of mathematics as the wide open frontier that it is. Perhaps it will inspire someone to prove Beal's Conjecture, just as a talk he heard as a young student inspired Andrew Wiles to prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
Key descriptors:
mathematics, Pythagorean Theorem
Suggested age range:
Year 11-13
Speaker:
Professor James W. Anderson
Related Staff Member
Professor James W Anderson
Professor James W Anderson is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Southampton, and is also the Associate Dean (Education and Student Experience) for the Faculty of Social, Human and Mathematical Sciences.
He is known for his work on spaces of deformations of Kleinian groups, which are discrete groups of isometries of hyperbolic spaces, and on mapping class groups of hyperbolic surfaces. He is also the author of a popular undergraduate textbook on Hyperbolic Geometry.
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