A University of Tokyo student who lost one of their Bluetooth earbuds outdoors managed to find it using a mathematical formula.
On the 1st of May (KST), Livedoor News reported that a first-year University of Tokyo student used the ‘Circumcenter of a Triangle Formula’ to locate their lost earbud.
According to the report, the student recently lost one of their earbuds while walking around the campus.
Finding the earbud seemed virtually impossible, but then the student remembered the ‘Circumcenter of a Triangle Formula.’ The student explained, “Without panicking, I turned on my Bluetooth and retraced my steps.”
This formula is used to find the ‘Circumcenter,’ the central point where the perpendicular bisectors of the three sides of a triangle intersect. The distances from the circumcenter to each vertex of the triangle are equal.
The student found three points where the Bluetooth signal was lost and connected them with lines to form a triangle. They then located the circumcenter of this triangle and headed towards it. About 10 minutes after starting the search, the student found the missing earbud lying on the ground.
The student added, “People usually think that math doesn’t help in everyday life, but there are many examples where simple calculations can be useful, like this one.”
Last year, the University of Tokyo was ranked 29th in the Times Higher Education (THE) list of the world’s top 200 universities.
