Do you recognize that distinctive bit of mathematics? It’s something you probably last encountered in high school and, for some people, seeing it again now might even trigger a few nightmares.
Most American students learn the algorithmic process for deriving the quadratic formula, and how to use it to solve quadratic equations, in Algebra I. And likely forgot it not long after. It’s a process that hasn’t changed for at least several hundred years.
Maybe going back 4000 years to the Babylonians, according to a mathematician at Carnegie Mellon University who has discovered a simpler method, “one that appears to have gone unnoticed these 4,000 years”.
