Forget What You Know by Jacob Barnett at TEDxTeen (Transcript)

Jacob Barnett

Full text of Forget What You Know presentation by Jacob Barnett at TEDxTeen conference…

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, I’m Jacob Barnett, are you guys excited?

All right. I am here to tell you why you guys should forget everything you know, right now.

So, first thing you guys need to know. So, suppose you guys are all doing your homework. Okay, you know, it’s something you have to do. And you’re doing great on your homework, you are getting great grades, you’re getting fabulous prizes, such as you know, Benjamins and all this great stuff. I’m here to tell you you’re doing it all wrong. That’s right. I did just say that. You’re doing it all wrong.

In order to succeed you have to look at everything with your own unique perspective. Okay, what does that mean? That means that when you think, you must think in your own creative way, not accepting everything that’s already out there. By the way, the people I’m showing you in the background are my little brothers Ethan and Wesley, one of them is a chemist and the other one is a meteorologist.

So, your perspective might be the only way you can see art or history or music, or whatever. So, let me show you one of the ways in which I can see math. So, for example, that’s 32 and the rotations represent: addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, et cetera. So today — my main reason of coming out here is to do some quantum mechanics, okay? So, today, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to do the Schrödinger equation, split it into time independent components, and we’re going to solve it for the boundary conditions of a lattice and a particle in the box. So, let’s get to work.