Two US high schoolers believe they have cracked a mathematical mystery left unproven for centuries. Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson looked at the Pythagorean theorem, foundational to trigonometry.

Akshat was working through a standard geometry exercise, the chapter that introduces the right-angled triangle and the formula a 2 + b 2 = c 2. He paused for a moment, not because the problem was ...