A 15-year-old high school student visiting Boston's Museum of Science thought he 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 thought he saw something that appeared wrong with the equation: minus signs where there should have been plus signs.
Rosenfeld notified the museum and later received a letter from its exhibit content developer, Alana Parkes, agreeing with his discovery and informing him the equation would be corrected.
Parkes wrote that the mistake had been there for a "very long time" without being noticed.
But much like the golden ratio is recognized by many names — divine proportion, golden mean and golden section — its formula is also represented in more than one template.
On Tuesday afternoon, Museum of Science spokeswoman Erin Shannon released a statement correcting the correction, noting "the way the Museum presents the Golden Ratio in its exhibit is in fact the less common — but no less accurate — way to present it.”
“It’s exciting that people around the country are talking about math and science and that, in the process, we learned something too,” the statement read.