Iraqi-born Swede wows math world, and at least one blogger

Don’t ask me why, but I love stories like this:

An Iraqi-born 16-year-old reportedly has cracked a math puzzle that has gone unsolved for over 300 years.

Mohamed Altoumaimi, who immigrated to Sweden six years ago, took only four months to find a formula that explains a sequence of calculations known as the Bernoulli numbers, a code that had stumped some of the best experts in the field, Agence France-Presse reported.

I know what you’re thinking: what the hell are the Bernoulli numbers?

The Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of signed rational numbers that can be defined by the identity

These numbers arise in the series expansions of trigonometric functions, and are extremely important in number theory and analysis.

There are actually two definitions for the Bernoulli numbers. To distinguish them, the Bernoulli numbers as defined in modern usage (National Bureau of Standards convention) are written B_n, while the Bernoulli numbers encountered in older literature are written B_n* (Gradshteyn and Ryzhik 2000). In each case, the Bernoulli numbers are a special case of the Bernoulli polynomials B_n (x) or B_n* (x) with B_n=B_n (0) and B_n*=B_n* (0).

Everyone understand? Me, neither.

Okay, so maybe he is smarter than me. But can he do this?

Heh. Didn’t think so.*

*Name that movie reference, get a free Eyes It Willy!

UPDATE – Linked at Paco Enterprises. And, man, you people do not know your vague movie references.