🇺🇸 Calcea Johnson

A $500 bonus question

In late 2022, St. Mary’s Academy — a historically Black Catholic girls’ school in New Orleans, founded in 1867 by the Sisters of the Holy Family — was running a schoolwide math contest. The bonus question offered $500 for something a well-known 1927 book had called impossible: a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry. Two seniors took it on. “$500 is a lot of money,” Calcea Johnson later told 60 Minutes. “So I — I would like to at least try.”

Nobody expected an answer. “I wasn’t necessarily looking for a solve,” said Michelle Blouin Williams, the teacher CBS credits with setting the challenge. “I was just looking for some ingenuity.” (The students’ paper credits another teacher, a former volunteer it calls “Mr. Rich,” with running the contest.) Starting in December 2022, the two spent about two months that winter on the problem, each working independently. Calcea’s mother counted 20 or 30 pages of her daughter’s work, and her father remembers a garbage can full of discarded attempts. “I started something,” Calcea said. “I need to finish it.”

Why it was supposed to be impossible

The theorem — in a right triangle, the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides — is older than Pythagoras: Babylonian scribes were recording number triples that satisfy it nearly 4,000 years ago, and Euclid proved it in Book I of the Elements. In The Pythagorean Proposition — first published in 1927 and expanded to 370 proofs in its 1940 edition — the American teacher Elisha Loomis ruled out a whole category: “There are no trigonometric proofs, because all the fundamental formulae of trigonometry are themselves based upon the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem.”

His reasoning was the trap of circular logic. The identity sin²θ + cos²θ = 1 is the Pythagorean theorem in disguise, so a proof that leans on it assumes what it sets out to prove. But “impossible” was already out of date: Jason Zimba published a trigonometric proof in 2009, and Nuno Luzia another in 2015. What the St. Mary’s students found was a new route.

The “waffle cone”

Their first proof begins with a right triangle whose two shorter sides differ in length. Reflect it to form an isosceles triangle; place that inside a larger right triangle — the shape the students nicknamed the “waffle cone” — and fill the cone with an infinite chain of ever-smaller similar triangles. Add up the lengths with a geometric series, then finish with the law of sines. The circular identity never appears.

Their paper also does some mathematical housekeeping. It separates what the authors call “cyclotopic” trigonometry — sine and cosine defined on the unit circle, where the Pythagorean theorem is built in — from trigonometry defined directly on right triangles, where it is not. “None of the theorems we use in our proofs … have already assumed the Pythagorean theorem to be true,” they wrote. Álvaro Lozano-Robledo, a mathematician at the University of Connecticut, told Science News of the first proof: “It looks like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

Atlanta, March 18, 2023

The next step surprised the students most. “Our teacher approached us and was like, ‘Hey, you might be able to actually present this,’” Ne’Kiya Jackson recalled. “I was like, ‘Are you joking?’ But she wasn’t.” On the morning of March 18, 2023, at the American Mathematical Society’s spring southeastern meeting at Georgia Tech in Atlanta — a gathering where some 800 mathematicians were expected — the two 17-year-olds presented “An Impossible Proof of Pythagoras” in a session on undergraduate research.

“I saw a bunch of people writing down stuff and pulling up things on their computers,” Calcea said afterward. Ne’Kiya remembered: “Some people apparently started recording.” The Society’s executive director, Catherine Roberts, encouraged them to submit the work to a peer-reviewed journal. The internet ran its own review in the meantime: one economist-blogger noted that a slide visible in a news report held enough detail to reconstruct the proof, and explainer videos followed within weeks.

Viral, doubted, celebrated

A WWL-TV report in late March went viral. Within a week the students were on Good Morning America and ABC News. Michelle Obama praised them, Governor John Bel Edwards commended them, the Louisiana Senate passed a resolution in their honor, and in April Mayor LaToya Cantrell gave them keys to the city of New Orleans.

Not everyone applauded. Pamela Rogers, the school’s president, told 60 Minutes that callers said “they could not have done it. African Americans don’t have the brains to do it.” Asked why so many people found the achievement striking, Ne’Kiya was direct: “Probably because we’re African American, one. And we’re also women.” She also said what she wanted instead: “I’d like to actually be celebrated for what it is. Like, it’s a great mathematical achievement.”

On May 5, 2024, Bill Whitaker profiled the pair on 60 Minutes; Calcea, who received the network’s first email, at first could not believe it was real. After the broadcast Charles Barkley pledged $1 million to St. Mary’s Academy, paid in $100,000 installments.

Five or ten new proofs

The paper went to The American Mathematical Monthly, among the most widely read mathematics journals in the world. It was received in February 2024, accepted in May and published online in late October as “Five or Ten New Proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem” — the lead article of the November 2024 issue (volume 131, number 9, pages 739–752). Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson are its only authors.

The title is exact. The paper writes out five proofs — four for right triangles whose shorter sides differ and a fifth that covers every right triangle — and describes a method that yields at least five more. Four of the published proofs are new since the Atlanta talk, Calcea told LSU. “I was pretty surprised to be published,” Ne’Kiya said. “I didn’t think it would go this far.” Calcea saw a wider point: “I am very proud that we are both able to be such a positive influence in showing that young women and women of color can do these things.” Della Dumbaugh, the journal’s editor, said the Monthly was “honored and delighted to publish the work of these two students.”

Born in the year of Katrina

Both were born in 2005, the year Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans. Ne’Kiya’s mother evacuated before the storm and gave birth to her in Georgia a week later, two months early. Calcea spent her first year in a FEMA trailer on the lawn of her family’s flooded home. Her parents, Cal and CeCe Johnson, appeared with her on 60 Minutes; so did Ne’Kiya’s mother, Neliska Jackson, who admitted she never checked the math — “most of the time I don’t understand what she’s doing.”

Calcea graduated as valedictorian of St. Mary’s class of 2023 and is a Girl Scout Gold Award recipient; the two left school with nearly $3 million in scholarship offers between them. In the paper’s author notes she lists video games, K-pop and musicals among her interests; Ne’Kiya lists cats and rabbits, billiards, anime and manga.

Where are Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson now?

Calcea studies environmental engineering in the Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College at Louisiana State University, which she entered in 2023; LSU’s review of the 2024–25 year and CBS’s updated report of August 2025 both place her there. After 60 Minutes, environmental engineers wrote to her offering mentorship. “I want to be able to come back and help the New Orleans communities, since they helped raise me,” she has said. Math will stay close, but not as a career: “I may take up a minor in math. But I don’t want that to be my job job.”

Ne’Kiya is at Xavier University of Louisiana, on the College of Pharmacy’s track toward a doctorate in pharmacy — on a full scholarship, CBS reported. Neither has published a second paper as of September 2026. And both still wave off the word this site is built on. Asked on 60 Minutes whether she was a genius, Calcea said: “I think that’s a stretch.”