A 17-year-old Chinese student from a rural vocational school who shocked her country by ranking 12th among 802 participants in an elite math contest is now facing accusations of cheating.

Math contests are a big deal in China, but it’s very rare for such competitions to capture the attention of an entire country like this year’s Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition. Organized by Alibaba’s DAMO Academy and the Alibaba Foundation, the contest is free to enter for math enthusiasts from around the world, but it is usually dominated by math majors from prestigious institutions such as Harvard, Oxford, and MIT. However, this year, something extraordinary happened. Not only was 17-year-old Jiang Ping the only girl in the top 30 after the first round of the competition, but she was also the only one whose studies didn’t focus on math. The unlikely math genius studies fashion design at a rural vocational school in Jiangsu Province, and only studies advanced mathematics as a hobby.

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A couple of Japanese math enthusiasts recently spent 24 hours covering the walls of an entire room with calculations in an attempt to find the ultimate answer to the ‘1+1’ formula.

It’s widely regarded as the easiest mathematical formula, but ‘1+1’ isn’t as simple as it appears. Well, at least not to math purists looking to apply multiple fields of mathematics while tackling this deceptively simple calculation. Popular YouTubers and math enthusiasts Hanao and Dengan recently proved this by spending a whopping 24 hours and covering the walls and floor of an entire room with calculations in one of their most intriguing projects yet.

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Yu Jianchun, A Chinese migrant worker from Henan province with no former mathematical training and no college degree, is being hailed as a real-life version of Will Hunting, the character played by Matt Damon in the 1997 Oscar-winning film “Good Will Hunting”, after finding an alternative method to verify Carmichael numbers.

Carmichael numbers, also known as “pseudo primes”, are large numbers that only appear to be prime numbers, which are only divisible by one and themselves. They are used for credit card encryption and online payments, among other things. There are examinations that can be done to find out which numbers are prime and which are Carmichael numbers, but it’s tricky work. Apparently, a young mailman with no studies in advanced mathematics has just come up with a simpler way to verify Carmichael numbers.

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Put mathematics and broccoli together and you have the two most hated things of my childhood. And that’s exactly what the Romanesco Broccoli is all about. But now that I’m an adult, I find that I’m actually able to appreciate the intricacy of this rare vegetable. The broccoli takes the form of a fractal – a complex geometrical shape that looks almost the same at every scale factor. So each broccoli is made up of smaller florets that mimic the fractal shape to perfection, which in turn are made of even smaller florets of similar shape… and this goes on and on to the tiniest florets.

If you break off a floret from the main head, it looks like a mini-version of the broccoli with its own mini florets. No matter which part of the fractal you zoom into, it will look like an identical version of the bigger picture. It’s fascinating to think that something like this naturally occurs in nature, let alone on a vegetable. A detailed pattern that goes on repeating itself is rare and certainly a thing of beauty.

The Romanesco Broccoli is nothing short of a mathematical marvel, reminiscent of the Fibonacci series – a sequence of consecutive numbers that add up to the next number. Like: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. So how can a broccoli imitate a series of numbers? Simple. On closer inspection, the Romanesco is revealed to have a spiral starting from the center point. All the smaller florets are arranged around this spiral. In essence, this is the Fibonacci spiral – a series of arcs with radii that follow the Fibonacci sequence. If you count the number of spirals in each direction, they will always be consecutive Fibonacci numbers. A math lesson on a vegetable – isn’t that amazing?

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