09/01/2024: Secretary of Commerce, On British Soil, St. Mary’s

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This is just good business.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is a fast-rising star in the Democratic Party,

enforcing large parts of our tough China trade policy

while working to create millions of new jobs here in the U.S.

Wow.

We allowed manufacturing in this country to wither on the vine

in search of cheaper labor in Asia, cheaper capital in Asia,

and here we are.

It's pretty well hidden, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's all overgrown.

If you didn't know how to get here, you wouldn't easily stumble across it.

On the windswept island of Alderney,

the Nazis operated concentration camps

and the British soiled.

Decades later, the British government is investigating

how many people were killed here.

Why might the British government have tried to cover up

what happened on the Channel Islands?

So, are you math geniuses?

Not at all.

How did these high school students prove an ancient mathematical equation

that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years?

We start with just a regular question.

A regular right triangle, where the angle in the corner is 90 degrees.

Then we start creating similar, but smaller, right triangles.

And then it continues for infinity.

Am I going a little too...

You've been beyond me since the beginning.

I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Bill Whitaker.

I'm Anderson Cooper.

I'm Sharon Alfonsi.

I'm John Wertheim.

I'm Cecilia Vega.

I'm Scott Pelley.

Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

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What does the Secretary of Commerce do?

Until now, mainly promote U.S. businesses abroad.

It had not been a high-profile job

till Gina Raimondo turned the second-tier agency

into a center of job creation, manufacturing,

and national security.

Once the governor of Rhode Island,

Raimondo, at 53, seems to have come out of nowhere

to become a rising star of the Democratic Party,

and of the Biden administration.

As Commerce Secretary, she's running new projects

that, as we first reported in April,

could touch the lives of every American.

And she's helping lead the expanding Cold War with China

and confront Russia's aggression in Ukraine.

The battlefield for both those conflicts is technology.

If you think about national security today, in 2024,

it's not just tanks and missiles, it's technology.

It's semiconductors, it's AI, it's drones.

And the Commerce Department is at the red-hot center of technology.

And at the red-hot center, a global chip war

that ramped up, says Gina Raimondo,

when Russia invaded Ukraine.

The Commerce Department stopped all semiconductor chips

from being sold to Russia.

Every drone, every missile, every tank,

has semiconductors in them.

And, you know, Leslie, you know we're being effective

because shortly after we started that work,

we heard stories of the Russians taking semiconductors

out of refrigerators, out of dishwashers,

out of breast pumps, getting the chips

to put them into their military equipment.

However, the Russians are now working their way around this.

They are.

Successfully.

And they're doing better in the war, probably, because of this.

You are right in what you say.

But, she says,

It's absolutely the case that our export controls

have hurt their ability to conduct the war, made it harder,

and we are enforcing this every minute of every day,

doing everything we can.

These are some of the enforcers.

We should talk about our controls on Russia.

Raimondo's team at Commerce that monitors and polices

the ban on any commercial,

or any other company in the world,

from selling products with American chips in them to Russia.

But not just Russia.

I've made sure that the most advanced American technologies

can't be used in China.

The Chinese warn that these export controls

could trigger an escalating trade war.

Trade with China accounts for 750,000 U.S. jobs.

And if trade ends, we lose our jobs.

We want to trade with China.

On the vast majority of goods and services.

But on those technologies that affect our national security, no.

Those advanced chips aren't in consumer goods.

Banks use them. Hospitals.

This is going toward products that are made for civilian use.

Yeah, well, they also go into nuclear weapons, surveillance systems,

and we know they want these chips and our sophisticated technology

to advance their military.

Her toughness has made her a target in China,

where fake ads have her promoting the new Chinese-made smartphone.

Last year, the government in Beijing hacked her email.

And when she was in China, on a trip, ironically, to improve relations,

the tech company Huawei introduced that

new smartphone with an advanced Chinese-made chip.

It was kind of in your face, as if to say,

look at the chip that we have.

And it was a pretty good high-level chip.

Well, I have their attention, clearly.

And they've gotten yours.

Well, what it tells me is the export controls are working.

Because that chip is not nearly as good.

It's years behind.

What we have in the United States,

we have the most sophisticated semiconductors in the world.

China doesn't.

We've out-innovated China.

Well, we, you mean Taiwan.

Fair.

While American tech companies design the world's most advanced chips,

none are actually made in the U.S.

90% of them come from Taiwan,

and they are key to the future of U.S. military weaponry.

And China, from time to time,

threatens, you know, the wolf,

to invade Taiwan.

And some people say the whole reason

is to get their hands on those chips.

That's a problem. It's a risk. It makes us vulnerable.

The problem of our outsourcing production

goes way beyond high tech,

with millions of American workers

having lost their jobs that went overseas,

something Raimondo knows firsthand.

Growing up as the youngest child

in an Italian-American family,

in Rhode Island.

This is the old Bulova watch factory

where my dad worked for almost 30 years.

Her dad lost his job

when Bulova abandoned the factory in 1983

and moved its operations to China.

It's hard for you to imagine it now,

as you look around here,

but this was, you know, a bustling place.

You know, they had a thousand people working here,

food trucks on the sidewalk,

an electroplating shop there,

a tool and die shop there,

and now this is what you have.

And how old were you?

I was in, like, sixth grade,

but I saw the toll it took

on my dad and my family.

And that influenced her career choices,

from when she studied economics

and played rugby at Harvard...

So this is my office.

...to when she left a high-paying job

as a venture capitalist

to run for public office in Rhode Island.

This was the day that I was sworn in

as state treasurer,

and those were my parents.

That was my dad.

That's your dad?

Super proud of me.

The man who worked at Bulova?

The man who worked at Bulova,

the man who taught me about manufacturing,

taught me that a job is about your pride,

ability to take care of your family,

not just a paycheck.

Married with two children,

Raimondo, a Rhodes Scholar

and Yale Law School graduate,

was elected the state's first female governor in 2014

as a moderate, pro-business Democrat.

Liberals in your party,

this is a quote,

look upon you as a sellout to big business.

I think that's ridiculous.

I hold businesses accountable

as much as anyone.

When I tell them they can't sell

their semiconductors to China,

they don't love that, but I do that.

In late 2020,

President-elect Joe Biden called her

about leading the Commerce Department,

which, till then,

managed without much fanfare or headlines

a mishmash of agencies and assignments,

ranging from monitoring the weather

to measuring the level of contaminants

in household dust.

So one day, President-elect Biden

calls you and said,

what about being Commerce Secretary?

And you heard that and thought...

Truthfully, initially I thought,

what does a Commerce Secretary do?

Yeah.

And then the President-elect said to me,

come, I want you to work with me

to help rebuild American manufacturing.

And I called my brother, my big brother,

and he said, Gina, Dad would be so proud.

You gotta do it. You gotta do it.

And that was it.

Once at Commerce,

she began to lean on Congress...

This is just good business.

...to fund her new programs

with $100 billion,

including $50 billion

for the bipartisan CHIPS Act

that she is now dispensing

to reduce America's reliance on Taiwan.

It's a huge day for the entire country.

In March, in Arizona,

she announced her first award

for making leading-edge chips

in the U.S. to Intel.

We are announcing our intention

to invest $8.5 billion in Intel,

America's champion semiconductor company.

Intel intends to construct

and modernize facilities in Arizona,

New Mexico, Oregon, and Ohio.

She's made other big awards,

totaling more than $20 billion,

including one to Taiwan-based TSMC

and another to the South Korean company Samsung

to make the world's most advanced chips

in Arizona and Texas.

Raimondo is also spreading her largesse

elsewhere in the country

with another huge initiative,

the Internet for All program.

We went with her to a corning factory

in North Carolina,

the world's largest manufacturer

of fiber-optic cable.

You're looking at fiber on these spools,

all different colors.

What's inside of there is actually

one of the most precise products

ever manufactured by man.

Wendell Weeks, chairman and CEO of Corning,

is expanding production

to make some of the 10 million miles

of new cable that's needed to connect

the 24 million Americans

living mostly in rural areas

of the U.S.

who don't have access to high-speed Internet.

And under prodding by Raimondo,

he's investing Corning's own capital to do it.

We've invested another half billion dollars

and doubled our footprint for the U.S.

When you're spending all this money

to connect, you know,

small numbers of people

who live miles away,

the expense almost doesn't make sense.

It does make sense.

The Internet is not the only way

to connect people to the Internet.

It's no longer a luxury.

You need it to see the doctor,

to go to school,

to do your business,

to pay your bills,

to sign up for, you know,

Social Security.

Everyone has electricity in this country.

Everyone ought to have the Internet.

Together, she says,

the Internet for All

and the CHIPS Act initiatives

will create about a half million jobs

by 2030.

But Wall Street is skeptical.

Intel, for example,

recently reported $7 billion

in operating losses.

When you go to pick

these different companies

to give them money to,

it's social industrial policy,

something, you know,

we gave up because it was shown

the private industry

does a better job picking.

You're smiling.

Well, do they?

Because in the case of semiconductors,

the market didn't get it right.

How did we lose this?

We allowed manufacturing

in this country

to wither on the vine

in search of cheaper labor in Asia,

cheaper capital in Asia,

and here we are.

We just pursued profit

over national security.

There are strings attached

to these grants.

They have to provide daycare.

You want them to have

a diverse workforce.

Be union workers?

That is not social policy, Leslie.

Sounds like it.

It's math.

This is pure math.

You won't have enough workers

to do the job

unless you figure out

how to get women

working in the facilities.

But on that point,

if they need women

and women need daycare,

that's a decision

for the company to make.

Why mandate it

if it's what they need?

It's not mandated.

To be clear,

these are not mandates.

But it's written in there.

It is written,

but you know what's funny?

I never hear complaints

about this from the companies.

The only complaints I have

are from politicians.

In her nearly four years

in Washington,

Raimondo has elevated

the Commerce Department

and its secretary

into a high-profile player.

China wakes up every day

figuring out how to get around

our regulations.

We've got to wake up every day

that much more relentless

and aggressive.

So I bring it every day.

So here comes

the inevitable obvious question

that you know is coming your way.

You are on a list

of future presidential candidates.

Does that sound good to you?

Is it appetizing?

What sounds good to me

is being the best

Commerce Secretary

there's ever been.

One qualification

for high office

is being able to duck

a question like that.

Or a question about

what role she might play

in the next administration

should Kamala Harris

win the White House.

Secretary Raimondo isn't saying,

but rumor has it

she'd be interested in becoming

the next Treasury Secretary.

That's a very good question.

But let me get you

back on track.

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Now, Holly Williams on assignment for 60 minutes.

The names Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald are infamous as the scene of atrocities,

concentration camps run by Adolf Hitler's notorious SS. But what you may be surprised to learn,

as we were, is that two Nazi concentration camps were established on British soil in the Channel

Islands around the United States. And they were built in the early 1960s. And they were built in

the early 1960s. And they were built in the early 1960s. And they were built in the early 1960s. And

they were built in the early 1960s. And they were built in the early 1960s. And they were built in the early

1980s. And they were built in the early 1980s. And they were built in the early 1980s. And they were

built in the early 1980s. And they were built in the early 1980s. And they were built in the early

1980s. And they were built in the early 1980s. And they were built in the early 1980s. And they were

built in the early 1980s. And they were built in the early 1980s. And they were built in the early

1980s. And they were built in the early 1980s. And they were built in the early 1980s. And they were

built in the early 1980s. And they were built in the early 1980s. And they were built in the early

1980s. And they were built in the early 1980s. And they were built in the early 1980s. And they were

The islands lie just off the coast of France,

became possessions of the English crown around 1,000 years ago

and were occupied by Germany for nearly five years during World War II.

We visited what remains of the camps this past winter,

just before the British government completed a review of the death toll there,

with findings that are hotly disputed.

It's pretty well hidden, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's all overgrown.

If you didn't know how to get here, you wouldn't easily stumble across it.

And this was the sort of back entrance.

There's not much left of the Third Reich's Lager Silt concentration camp.

On the windswept island of Alderney, about three miles long and one and a half wide,

nature is gradually swallowing up its crumbling concrete walls.

And the camps up here.

These take you straight into the...

The camp.

Wow.

Marcus Roberts is an Oxford-educated amateur historian who runs heritage tours.

He's spent years researching this forgotten chapter in British history.

So undoubtedly, if you wanted to put a pin on the map,

you could say this is where the Holocaust happened on British sovereign territory.

When Germany invaded France in 1940,

the British government calculated that...

Channel Islands had no strategic value and gave them up without a fight.

Nearly all of the residents of Alderney decided to evacuate before the German troops arrived.

On the empty island, the Germans set up two concentration camps as well as labour camps.

They brought in prisoners of war and forced labourers to build giant fortifications that still survive today.

Part of Hitler's Atlantic Wall to protect against...

...allied attack.

A minority of them were Jewish.

Others were from Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Spain.

I understand this was called the Tunnel of Death.

Yes, it was notorious in the memory of prisoners.

On two occasions, they were forced to cram in here in an apparent rehearsal for their own death.

After the war, in 1945, the British military investigated the camps

and put the death toll on Alderney in the...

...low hundreds.

Some of those who lost their lives were buried under this plot of land.

But Marcus Roberts and others argue that more than 10,000 must have died on the island

based on controversial calculations about the size of the labour force needed to build the fortifications.

Roberts told us it's because he's Jewish that he's determined to count all of the dead.

There's the Jewish instinct to...

...you know, leave no one behind.

You're trying to make sure that all the Jewish dead are counted?

Remembered.

If you don't remember a life, it's as if they never lived at all.

Most academics dispute Roberts' estimate of the death toll.

But partly as a result of those disagreements,

last year the British government appointed a team of researchers

to comb through archives across Europe

and more accurately count the number of prisoners who died on Alderney.

Dr. Julie Carr, an archaeologist at Cambridge University, is coordinating the review.

Why is this just a document search, not a dig?

It is likely that some of the people in mass graves were Jewish

and according to halakha or Jewish law, you cannot disturb the dead.

But the second reason is that according to prisoner statements,

some people were dumped at sea or thrown off cliffs.

What are we going to do, dig up the entire island?

Well, we can't do that.

The researchers are drawing on rich material.

The Nazis were meticulous record keepers

and British archives contain first-hand testimonies from survivors.

Look at this.

We were beaten with everything they could lay their hands on,

with sticks, spades, pickaxes.

It sounds absolutely ghastly.

On certain days, five to six,

up to ten men died.

Dr. Carr told us there's no evidence that gas chambers were used on Alderney.

But there were summary executions

and the prisoners built the Nazi fortifications on starvation rations.

Were they taken to Alderney to be worked to death?

They were certainly seen as expendable.

The aim was to get every ounce of work out of them

and if they died it didn't matter and that was kind of perhaps expected.

They were disposable human beings?

Yes.

How did your father end up in Alderney?

At a pub in the Channel Islands, we met Gary Font.

His father, Francisco Font, fought on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War,

was arrested in France, handed over to the Germans and sent to a concentration camp on Alderney.

Francisco survived and later married a British woman, Gary's mother.

He witnessed the execution of a young Soviet boy

who decided to leave the work in detail and to change his footwear.

So he decided to pick up these paper bags and wrap them around his feet

and then tie them with string.

And an SS guard had seen him do this and walked up to him and shot him point-blank range.

Gary told us his father's experiences left him scarred.

I saw the emotion on his face.

Yeah, it's a tough one.

Do you think that emotion came from that he had survived the war in Spain and survived the camp here?

Yeah, absolutely.

It was the first time I realised, wow, this man has a deep-rooted emotion inside him that he could never get out.

The British government's effort to get the truth out by recounting the dead

was commissioned by Lord Pickles.

Sir Eric Pickles!

A former cabinet minister and now the UK's envoy for post-Holocaust issues.

The figures vary, not by a few hundred, not by a few thousand, but by tens of thousands.

So it was the controversy that prompted you to commission the review?

Yes. It seemed to me that the sensible thing was, well, OK, let's do this in the open, let's do it fully transparent.

He's also asked the researchers to put names to as many of those killed as they can.

If you remember them as individuals, then it's another blow against Hitler.

Hitler wanted to eradicate the memory of people.

So this is kind of an ongoing fight against Hitler and his ideas?

Hitler's evil hand still continues to affect Europe and to affect the world.

But it's taken nearly 80 years for the British government to re-examine what happened on Alderney

and to make its report public.

The official British investigations in 1945 were classified for decades.

And unlike the trials of Nazi officials in Nuremberg,

the British authorities failed to prosecute a single German officer who worked on Alderney,

even though many of them ended up in British prisoner of war camps.

I mean, just to be clear,

these are possible war criminals.

The British government has gathered evidence against them.

And they are in British custody.

Yes, they are at this point, yes.

A sort of slam-dunk case.

You'd have thought.

That's led Marcus Roberts and others to claim that the British government

tried to cover up the extent of the atrocities on Alderney.

Dr Carr told us that could be true,

but one key document from the British War Office investigation

that may explain why there were so many people killed in Alderney.

He says there are no prosecutions is missing.

It could have been shredded decades ago

as part of what do we need these files for anymore.

But could it also have been shredded for more nefarious purposes?

I have no idea.

In order for me to say there was a cover-up,

I want to see the decisions taken.

I want to look through those steps and to make up my own mind.

Why might the British government have tried,

to cover up or whitewash what happened on Alderney

and maybe more broadly on the Channel Islands.

There are some things that happened that might not...

..that the British government might not necessarily

have wanted a wider audience to know about.

Those things, once feared too troubling for the broader public,

happened on three of the other Channel Islands,

where most residents did not evacuate before the occupation.

When the Germans arrived, the locals mostly cooperated,

often with little choice.

Hitler's portrait was hung outside this cinema on the island of Guernsey.

Nazi propaganda showed the British police working for German troops.

And British newspapers on the islands printed orders from Berlin.

This is a British newspaper and it's got the SWAS sticker on top.

That's right.

At the official archives on the island of Jersey,

Linda Romero...

The article showed us how British officials implemented Nazi policies,

asking Jewish residents to identify themselves

and then confiscating their assets.

There was a huge amount of requisitioning of people's houses,

people's property during the occupation period.

But some resisted,

risking punishment to paint anti-Nazi graffiti

and illegally listening to British news on the radio.

That's my great-aunt.

Louisa.

I suspect that she was probably quite steely.

One member of the resistance was Louisa Gould,

who hid an escaped Russian prisoner in her home for nearly two years.

And this is the house.

Jenny Lecote told us when her great-aunt Louisa was finally caught,

she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany.

She was killed in a Nazi gas chamber.

She was gassed to death, yeah.

After the occupation,

did the British government get in touch with your family

to talk about what Louisa had done during the occupation

and about her murder by the Nazis?

The British government, I think, were kind of ashamed.

They were horrified that it had happened

and they didn't really want to get too involved in what had gone on there.

Not wanting to talk about the resistance

or not wanting to talk about the occupation at all?

Well, it was such a mixed picture.

There were people who had resisted the Germans

as much as resistance was possible

within a tiny nine-by-five-mile island.

And there were also people who'd collaborated.

Some people had betrayed their own country.

The only possible legislation was treason,

which was still a hanging offence.

They didn't want to get into that.

That was the confusing, messy, dirty mixed picture

of the Channel Islands' occupation.

More of that messy, dirty history was revealed

when the British government...

The British government published its review in May.

According to the new count,

over 1,000 may have died in the camps.

Predictably, it hasn't satisfied everyone.

Some kind of an apology and, you know, moral recompense would be helpful.

You want the British government to apologise...

Yeah, they just...

..for not having prosecuted alleged war criminals?

Yeah, so I think it would be appropriate for them to recognise

what should have been done didn't happen.

The horrors carried out...

..on this tiny, remote island are difficult to imagine.

The victims were silenced and buried.

But now, nearly eight decades later,

they're finally being counted.

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For many high school students returning to class this month,

it may seem like geometry and trigonometry

were created by the Greeks as a form of torture.

So imagine our amazement when we heard two high school seniors

had proved a mathematical puzzle

that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years.

We met Kelsey Johnson and Nakia Jackson

at their all-girls Catholic high school in New Orleans.

And as we first reported this past spring,

we expected to find two mathematical prodigies.

Instead, we found at St. Mary's Academy,

all students are told their possibilities are boundless.

Come Mardi Gras season,

New Orleans is alive with colorful parades

replete with floats and beads and high school marching bands.

In a city where uniqueness is celebrated,

St. Mary's stands out,

with young African-American women playing trombones and tubas,

twirling batons and dancing, doing it all.

Which defines St. Mary's, students told us.

Junior Christina Blasio says the school instills in them

they have the ability to accomplish anything.

That is kind of a standard here, so we aim very high.

Like, our aim is excellence for all students.

The private Catholic elementary and high school

sits behind the Sisters of the Holy Family,

family convent in New Orleans East.

The academy was started by an African-American nun

for young Black women just after the Civil War.

The convent still supports the school with the help of alumni.

In December 2022, seniors Nakia Jackson and Kelsey Johnson

were working on a school-wide math contest

that came with a cash prize.

I was motivated because there was a monetary incentive

because I was like, $500 is a lot.

So I would like to at least try.

Both were staring down the thorny bonus question.

So tell me, what was this bonus question?

It was to create a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem.

And it kind of gave you a few guidelines

on how would you start a proof.

The seniors were familiar with the Pythagorean theorem,

a fundamental principle of geometry.

You may remember it from high school.

A squared plus B squared equals C squared.

In plain English, when you know the lengths of two sides

of a right triangle, you can figure out the length of the third.

Both had studied geometry and some trigonometry,

and both told us math was not easy.

What no one told them was there'd been more than 300 documented proofs

of the Pythagorean theorem using algebra and geometry.

But for 2,000 years, a proof using trigonometry was thought to be impossible.

And that was the bonus question facing them.

When you looked at the question, did you think, boy, this is hard?

Yeah.

What motivated you to say, well, I'm going to try this?

I think I was like, I started something, I need to finish it.

So you just kept on going?

Yeah.

For two months that winter, they spent almost all their free time working on the proof.

She was like, Mom, this is a little bit too much.

Kelsey and Cal Johnson are Kelsey's parents.

So then I started looking at what she really was doing,

and it was pages and pages and pages of like over 20 or 30 pages for this one problem.

Yeah, the garbage can was full of papers where she would, you know, work out the problems.

And if that didn't work, she would ball it up, throw it in the trash.

Did you look at the problem?

Naliska Jackson is Nakia's mother.

Personally, I did not.

Because most of the time, I don't understand.

I don't understand what she's doing.

What if we did this?

What if I write this?

Does this help?

A, X squared.

Their math teacher, Michelle Bluen-Williams, initiated the math contest.

And did you think anyone would solve it?

Well, I wasn't necessarily looking for a solve, so no, I didn't.

What were you looking for?

I was just looking for some ingenuity, you know.

Kelsey and Nakia delivered on that.

They tried to explain their groundbreaking work to 60 Minutes.

Kelsey's proof is appropriately titled,

The Waffle Cone.

So, to start the proof, we start with just a regular right triangle,

where the angle in the corner is 90 degrees,

and the two angles are alpha and beta.

So then, what we do next is we draw a second congruent,

which means they're equal in size.

But then we start creating similar, but smaller, right triangles,

going in a pattern like this, and then it continues for infinity.

And eventually, it creates this larger waffle cone,

but it's not in shape.

Am I going a little too...?

Yeah, you've been beyond me since the beginning.

Oh.

So, how did you figure out the proof?

Okay, so we have a right triangle, 90-degree angle, alpha and beta.

Then what did you do?

Okay, I have a right triangle inside of the circle,

and I have a perpendicular bisector at OP

to divide the triangle, to make that small right triangle.

And that's...

That's basically what I use for the proof.

That's the proof.

That's what I call amazing.

Well, thank you.

There had been one other documented proof of the theorem using trigonometry

by mathematician Jason Zimba in 2009, one in 2,000 years.

Now, it seems, Nakia and Kelsey have joined perhaps the most exclusive club in mathematics.

So, you both independently came up with proof

that only use trigonometry.

Yes.

So, are you math geniuses?

I think that's a stretch.

If not genius, you're really smart at math.

Not at all.

To document Kelsey and Nakia's work,

math teachers at St. Mary's submitted their proofs

to an American Mathematical Society conference in Atlanta in March 2023.

Well, our teacher approached us and was like,

hey, you might be able to actually present this.

I was like, are you joking?

But she wasn't.

So, we went, I got up there, we presented, and it went well, and it blew up.

It blew up.

Yeah.

What was the blow up like?

Insane, unexpected, crazy, honestly.

Today's story features two high school students, Kelsey Johnson and Nakia Jackson.

It took millennia to prove, but just a minute for word of their accomplishment

to go around the world.

They got a write-up in South Korea and a shout-out from former First Lady Michelle Obama,

a commendation from the governor, and keys to the city of New Orleans.

Why do you think so many people found what you did to be so impressive?

Probably because we're African American, one, and we're also women.

So, I think, oh, and our age.

Of course, our age has probably played a big part.

So, you think people were surprised that young African American women

could do such a thing.

Yes, definitely.

I'd like to actually be celebrated for what it is.

Like, it's a great mathematical achievement.

Achievement, that's a word you hear often around St. Mary's Academy.

Kelsey and Nakia follow a long line of barrier-breaking graduates.

So good over there.

The late queen of Creole cooking, Leah Chase, was an alum.

So was the first African American female New Orleans police chief, Michelle Woodfork.

I sit before you.

And judge for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Dana Douglas.

Math teacher, Michelle Bluen-Williams, told us Kelsey and Nakia

are typical St. Mary's students.

They're not unicorns.

Oh, no.

If they are unicorns, then every single lady that has matriculated through this school

is a beautiful, black unicorn.

You good?

Pamela Rogers, St. Mary's president and interim principal, told us the students hear that message

from the moment they walk in the door.

We believe all students can succeed.

All students can learn.

It does not matter the environment that you live in.

So when word went out that two of your students had solved this almost impossible math problem,

were they universally applauded?

In this community, they were greatly applauded.

Across the country, there were many naysayers.

What were they saying?

They were saying, oh, they could not have done it.

African-Americans don't have the brains to do it.

Of course, we sheltered our girls from that, but we absolutely did not expect it to come in the volume that it came.

And after such wonderful achievement.

People have a vision of who can be successful.

And to some people, it is not always an African-American female.

And to us, it's always an African-American female.

What we know is when teachers lay out some expectations that say,

you can do this, kids will work as hard as they can to do it.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin,

has studied how best to teach African-American students.

She told us an encouraging teacher can change a life.

And what's the difference, say, between having a teacher like that

and a whole school dedicated to the excellence of these students?

So a whole school is almost like being in heaven.

What do you mean by that?

Many of our young people have their ceilings lowered,

that somewhere around fourth or fifth grade, their thoughts are,

I'm not going to be anything special.

What I think is probably happening at St. Mary's is young women come in

as perhaps ninth graders and are told, here's what we expect to happen,

and here's how we're going to help you get there.

Who is the author of this story?

At St. Mary's, half the students get scholarships subsidized by fundraising

to defray the $8,000 a year tuition.

Here, there's no test to get in, but expectations are high and rules are strict.

No cell phones.

Modest skirts.

Hair must be its natural color.

Students Raya Sadiq, Summer Ford, Carissa Washington, Tatum Williams,

and Christina Blasio told us they appreciate the rules and rigor.

Especially the standards that they set for us, they're very high,

and I don't think that's ever going to change.

So is there a heart, a philosophy, an essence to St. Mary's?

The sisterhood.

Yes.

And nuns, you mean?

I mean, yeah.

You.

So when you're here, there's just no question that you're going to go on to college.

College is all they talk about.

And Arizona State University.

Principal Rogers announces to her 615 students the colleges where every senior has been accepted.

So for 17 years, you've had a 100% graduation rate and a 100% college acceptance rate.

Yes.

That's correct.

Nakia Jackson.

Last year, when Nakia and Kelsey graduated, all their classmates went to college and got scholarships.

Nakia got a full ride to the pharmacy school at Xavier University in New Orleans.

Kelsey, the class valedictorian, is studying environmental engineering at Louisiana State University.

So wait a minute.

Neither one of you is going to pursue a career in math?

No.

I may take up a minor in math.

I don't want that to be my job job.

Yeah.

People might expect too much out of me if I become a mathematician.

But math is not completely in their rearview mirrors.

This spring, they submitted their high school proofs for final peer review and publication

and are still working on further proofs of the Pythagorean theorem.

Since their first two...

We found five, and then we found a general format that could potentially produce at least five additional.

And you're not math geniuses?

No.

I'm not buying it.

I'm Bill Whitaker.

We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.

If you like this podcast, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app.

Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a quick survey at wondery.com slash survey.

I'm Dan Taberski.

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