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By PENNY SCHWARTZJTA news service

Joseph Rosenfeld, a 15-year-old Jewish math enthusiast from Vir-ginia, has the media abuzz about the golden ratio after questioning the accuracy of a display at the Museum of Science in Boston.

Rosenfeld, a sophomore at Handley High School in Win-chester, VA, is suddenly in the me-dia spotlight, with coverage from the Boston Globe, Britain’s Daily Mail and Fox & Friends, where he was interviewed Wednesday, July 15.

He’s taking the unexpected media attention in stride. “I’m surprised. I didn’t think anyone would be this interested in math,” he told JTA in a phone conversa-tion that also included his father, Scott Rosenfeld.

The museum, which originally agreed with Rosenfeld, has since changed its view but is taking advantage of all the attention to math.

Rosenfeld has been invited back for a special visit to the new “Sci-ence of Pixar” exhibit, he told JTA.

On his annual visit to the mu-seum last month, Rosenfeld no-ticed minus signs in the museum’s formula for the golden ratio in the “Mathematica” exhibit, developed in 1981 by designers Charles and Ray Eames.

The moment recalls the dramat-ic scene in Good Will Hunting in which an MIT janitor, played by Matt Damon, solves an extremely difficult math equation written on a whiteboard at the university.

Rosenfeld was expecting to see the golden ratio expressed with plus signs, he told JTA. That’s how he had learned it in middle school, where he studied it for a special project.

The golden ratio, a special num-ber approximately equal to 1.618, is said to be found throughout his-tory in art, geometry, nature and architecture going back to the Greek Parthenon, the Egyptian pyramids and works by Renais-sance man Leonardo da Vinci, as well as modern architects.

After checking some websites and snapping a photo, Rosenfeld left a note and then followed up with an email.

The museum responded prompt-ly – initially acknowledging that there was an error. But on July 14,

Joseph Rosenfeld noticed that at the Museum of Science in Boston, the golden rule is written with minus rather than plus signs and snapped this photo. Photo by Scott Rosenfeld

Joseph Rosenfeld, left, and his brother, Adam, visiting the “Fox & Friends” studio in Washington, D.C., July 9

Jewish whiz kid catches math ‘mistake’ at Boston museum

By JENNIFER BRODYJUF/JTA news serviceAt a time when America’s he-

roes are dwindling, filmmak-ers and historians have turned to Abraham Lincoln for inspiration.

The 16th U.S. president inspired Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film examining how his political acumen helped him get Congress to pass the 13th Amendment for-mally abolishing slavery. Another film, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, imagines “The Great Emancipator” as a slayer of slave-holding Southern vampires.

Lincoln’s relationship with the Jews, a lesser-known story, is the inspiration for a groundbreaking exhibit that opens Aug. 3 at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Li-brary and Museum in Springfield, IL.

Titled “With Firmness in the Right: Lincoln and the Jews,” the exhibit opened earlier this year at the New York Historical Society. It is based on the book Lincoln and the Jews: A History, by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell.

“These are not the stories you’ve heard about Lincoln from

textbooks,” said Carla Knorows-ki, CEO of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation. “It opens up a whole new world of another aspect of Lincoln’s life.”

Many may be surprised to learn that Lincoln was deeply commit-ted to religious pluralism and had more Jewish friends and acquain-tances than any president before him. In 1809, the year of Lincoln’s birth, scarcely 3,000 Jews lived in America. By 1865, the year of his assassination, the number had in-creased to 150,000.

The exhibit includes a series of letters between Lincoln and Abra-ham Jonas, a Jewish lawyer from Quincy, IL, who is instrumental in Lincoln’s political rise. In a friendship that spans just over two decades, Jonas is one of the first to support Lincoln’s candidacy for president and urges the Republi-can Party to woo political outsid-ers like the “liberal and freethink-ing Germans” and “Israelites.”

In 1861, Lincoln rewards Jonas with a plum political appointment: postmaster of Quincy. But per-haps the greatest testament to their friendship is Lincoln’s handwrit-

ten order in May 1864 to allow one of Jonas’ sons, Charles, then a Confederate prisoner of war, “a parole of three weeks to visit his dying father.”

Lincoln’s fundamental sense of fairness distinguished him throughout his political career. Ev-idence of this trait appears in many of the documents, photographs, letters, Bibles and other artifacts assembled for the Springfield ex-hibit.

The items – some being dis-played publicly for the first time – are drawn from sources that include the Shapell Manuscript Foundation, the Chicago Histori-cal Society, Brown University and the Library of Congress.

The exhibit includes a tracing of Lincoln’s feet and highlights his close relationship with his eccen-tric foot doctor, the British-born Issachar Zacharie, who is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery. In 1863, The New York World re-ported that the doctor “enjoyed Mr. Lincoln’s confidence more than any other private individual.”

Lincoln even sent Zacharie on peace and intelligence missions

it issued a statement confirming that the exhibit is accurate.

“It’s not at all surprising that this enterprising student noticed the minus signs because the way the museum presents the Golden Ratio in its exhibit is in fact the less common – but no less accu-rate – way to present it. It’s excit-ing that people around the country are talking about math and science and that, in the process, we learned something, too. Let’s hear it for STEM education and for Joseph Rosenfeld!” the statement said.

Mathematician Ira Gessel, a math professor at Brandeis Uni-versity, doesn’t see what all the fuss about. In an email to JTA, he said he agrees with the museum’s statement and that the formula in its exhibit is correct.

Rosenfeld, a member of the

youth advisory committee on the Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum in his hometown, said he now understands that both formu-las are correct and that the exhibit uses the less common one.

Scott Rosenfeld told JTA that the family, members of Beth El Congregation in Winchester, trav-els widely and has visited Israel and South India. Joseph especially enjoyed his visit to Jerusalem, he said.

Joseph’s friends have been con-gratulating him, but other than some more media interviews, he’s not expecting any other changes to his summer. Still, he said, “I’m definitely excited about going to the Pixar exhibit.”

Exhibit explores Lincoln’s relationship with Jewsto the South during the Civil War. The president had just appointed Gen. Nathaniel Banks to replace the anti-Semitic Benjamin Butler in the Gulf. With Jewish connec-tions in New Orleans, Zacharie was the ideal choice to help repair relations with its 2,000 Jews.

Urging Banks to make some-what mysterious use of Zacharie’s skills, Lincoln said, “I think he might be of service to you, first in his peculiar profession, and, sec-ondly, as a means of access to his countrymen, who are quite numer-ous in some of the localities you will probably visit.”

Lincoln made bold decisions that transformed Jews from outsiders to insiders in American society. One significant example is the overturning of Ulysses Grant’s General Orders No. 11 (December 1862), which expelled Jews “as a class” from Union-controlled territory (including parts of southern Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi). Born out of frustration with some Jewish cotton smugglers, the edict qualifies as “the most blatant state-sanctioned act of anti-Semitism in American history,” according to Lincoln and the Jews.

Daniel Stowell, the Lincoln

Presidential Library’s curator for the exhibit, agrees that the countermand of the Grant order showed how Lincoln stood up to anti-Semitic generals. “Lincoln gave wide latitude to generals that were succeeding, and Grant was one of them,” Stowell said. “Lin-coln would have had no trouble if Grant said, ‘OK, all peddlers need to leave the area,’ but Lincoln was quoted as saying he did not like condemning a whole group be-cause of a few sinners.”

In September 1862, Lincoln took another bold action, appoint-ing Rabbi Jacob Frankel of Phila-delphia as the U.S. military’s first Jewish chaplain, and that docu-ment is included in the Springfield exhibit. At the time there were 7,000 Jews in the Union Army.

“Many Jews did feel like sec-ond-class citizens, especially in the decades prior to the Civil War, but Lincoln establishes this sense that all sorts of people should be treated as equals. The Emancipa-tion Proclamation was all about that idea,” he said.

(Jennifer Brody is a former as-sociate editor at JUF News and a freelance writer living in Chi-cago.)