A 17-year-old discovered a calculus technique that solved integral equations. The high schooler, named Glenn Bruda, stumbled upon it when he woke up in the middle of the night to fetch a glass of water. He was ready to go back to sleep when the solution to a formula he had been trying to solve for months hit him.
After revisiting the notes he wrote that night, he cross-checked the newly formed calculus technique with professors at Santa Fe College and the University of Florida. With their encouragement, Bruda published his discovery to Cornell University’s “arXiv”, an open-access archive for scholarly scientific articles. Bruda named his technique the “Maclaurin Integration” after Colin Maclaurin, a famous 18th-century Scottish mathematician, where his solution was derived from.
Image credit: Jennifer Bruda