NEW ORLEANS — Two New Orleans high school seniors from St. Mary's Academy were featured in a '60 Minutes special on Sunday, May 5. Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson sat down with CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker to discuss their 'impossible' mathematical discovery in proving the Pythagorean Theorem.
The TV series posted a short clip on X teasing the special.
In the video, Whitaker asks the two, "Are you math geniuses?" Ne'Kiya shakes her head before she says, "Not at all."
Then Calcea starts to explain the method they used by "creating similar but smaller right triangles and then it continues for infinity," she said smiling at Whitaker. "Am I going a little too..." she said.
"You've been beyond me since the beginning," Whitaker responded and they shared some laughs.
Last March, Johnson and Jackson gave a presentation at the American Mathematical Society's Annual Southeastern Conference. They found a way to prove the Pythagorean Theorem using trigonometry without circular logic—something mathematicians have been trying to do for nearly 2,000 years.
They were the only two high school students in the room at the time.
Now, Calcea is a freshman at LSU and Ne'Kiya is attending Xavier University of Louisiana.
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