FILE - In this June 23, 2015, file photo, John Handley High School sophomore Joseph Rosenfeld, poses for a photo at the school in Winchester, Va. Rosenfeld discovered a decades-old math error that had gone unnoticed at the Museum of Science in Boston during a visit. (Jeff Taylor/The Winchester Star via AP, File)
BOSTON (AP) — A 15-year-old high school student visiting Boston’s Museum of Science has uncovered a math error in the golden ratio at a 34-year-old exhibit.
Virginia resident Joseph Rosenfeld was visiting the museum on a recent family trip when he saw something that appeared wrong with the equation.
Joseph noticed minus signs in the equation where there should have been plus signs. He left a message at the desk and later received a letter from the museum’s exhibit content developer, Alana Parkes, informing him the equation would be corrected.
Parkes wrote that the mistake had been there for a “very long time” without being noticed.
Joseph tells Boston.com (http://bit.ly/1fiu3PH ) that catching the error was exciting. He hopes to return to the state someday to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
LvanBthvn
Minus signs? Plus signs? As far as I know, the equation that yields the golden ratio contains just a single plus sign: a + b over a = a over b = Greek phi (the golden ratio).
JoeOvercoat
Local news reports that Alana Parkes, the museum’s exhibit content developer, wrote, ““You are right that the formula for the Golden Ratio is incorrect. We will be changing the – sign to a + sign on the three places it appears if we can manage to do it without damaging the original,”. Perhaps the exhibit has multiple instances of the formula.
It does appear that none of the reporters bothered to look up what the Golden Ratio is, and simply parroted the story. It’s the New Oral Tradition.
LvanBthvn
That may be right. I got the equation out of a textbook, but it doesn’t really make sense, since a and b aren’t specified. I think it would only work, if a and b were adjacent numbers in the Fibonacci series: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55, etc. The higher you go in the series, the closer you get to the golden ratio.