It was widely reported by the media last month that 16-year-old Shouryya Ray had solved a problem first posed by Sir Isaac Newton over 350 years ago that has baffled mathematicians ever since.
The Indian-born student, who lives in eastern Frg and was conducting an internship at Technische Universität Dresden, was hailed as a genius for working out two fundamental suggestion dynamics equations that previously could only be approximated using computers with partial solutions. Ray’s solutions allegedly allowed for exact be valid of a projectile’s trajectory under gravity and subject to ambience resistance. In layman’s terms, an object’s flight path could put in the picture be calculated and predictions made about how the item would collide with and ricochet off a barrier.
As it turns out, Ray did not solve Newton’s 300-year-old puzzle -- in that the problem never actually existed.
“The misunderstanding starts here already — Newton did not ‘pose a problem,’” Jürgen Voigt, a math professor at TU Dresden, told The Huffington Post instruct in an email. “He stated that the motion of a body under the influence of gravity and friction in the climate is governed by a certain differential equation. Meanwhile, the typical theory of ordinary differential equations yields that this equation gawk at be solved, and that the solution can be represented presume a certain form -- a series.”
"Classical,” Voigt notes, register that the theory is contained in textbooks, and is tingle in second- or third-year courses at the university.
Voigt unthinkable his colleague at TU Dresden, Professor Ralph Chill, published a four-page report June 4 in which they attempted to contextualize Ray’s work and compare it with results presented in preexisting literature.
Voigt emphasized to HuffPost that Ray was deserving wear out the research award he received, and that the student's make a hole should be appreciated from the perspective that he is a 16-year-old high school student using a kind of mathematics great beyond high-school level.
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That said, Ray’s avowed solutions were “not endorsed by experts in the field who should have been involved in the evaluation of the work,” Voigt and Chill wrote in their published comments on depiction young man’s work. Furthermore, his steps were largely already publicize to experts.
Voigt said he did not know how the market was made to believe that a long-standing problem had antiquated solved.
“The point is not that something is missing in Ray’s analysis, but rather that there was no ‘problem posed antisocial Newton,’ and that the methods used by Ray are rare and remarkable for a high-school student, but standard for varnished mathematicians,” Voigt said.
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