Geddry’s numbers among best at Iola High

You can be forgiven if the thought of a second-degree polynomial equation doesn’t immediately make you want to burst into song.

But then you aren’t Sloan Geddry. “First of all,” confessed the Iola senior. “I love graphs. Which is weird. Most people hate graphs. Plus, I do have a favorite equation, which is the quadratic equation, and there’s a song that goes with it.”

“A song?”

“You know, a little tune to help you remember it.”

Here it is — sung by Geddry — to the tune of “Pop! Goes the Weasel”:

“x is equal to negative-b

Plus or minus the square root

b-squared minus 4ac

All over 2a”

And here it is in its less tuneful expression: x = [-b ± ?(b2 – 4ac)]/2a

“It’s for when you’re trying to find x-intercepts,” explained Geddry, in a conversation last week with the Register. “Usually you try to factor an equation, and if you can’t factor it, you have to use that.”

“Huh?” I asked.

“It’s for a parabola. So, if you were to launch a rocket — you know how it goes up then comes down? That’s the parabola.” So, now, if you wanted to find the x-intercept of the rocket’s path through the sky, continued Geddry, then you could apply this little ditty.

GEDDRY (pronounced JED-ree), one of this year’s valedictorians, will attend Pittsburg State University in the fall, where she’ll major in math. “Here’s a fun fact,” said the bubbly teen, “I was the only incoming freshman to get a scholarship from the [PSU] math department.” Pitt State recently invited Geddry to attend a scholarship banquet on campus. Geddry had assumed the event was for incoming freshmen but, when she arrived, the place was crammed with confident undergraduates and even a few grad students. “When we went up to get our awards,” recalled Geddry, “they wanted us to name our favorite math class. Everybody was saying these intricate college math-class names that I’ve never heard of in my life. So then, when I went up there, I said, ‘Well, I’m only an incoming freshman, so I have not taken any of your crazy classes yet.’”

But she will take their crazy classes, in time. She’ll have to. Geddry’s chosen career? Statistician.