My guess (I could be wrong of course) is that he rediscovered some version of the van Staudt or Kummer congruences (or the generalization which says, that, suitably normalized, the Bernoulli numbers are p-adically continuous). It's an interesting sea change -- before the advent of the web -- especially excellent Wikipedia articles -- it might have been very difficult for someone from the "hinterlands" to find things in the literature. Just think of the initial letters that Ramanujan sent to GH Hardy, in which he discovered for himself some things that were already "well-known". Nevertheless, it sounds like a significant accomplishment by a 16 year old -- if nothing else it shows his ability and concentration. Victor On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 3:14 PM, N. J. A. Sloane <njas@research.att.com>wrote:
A later news item reports that the formula is well-known.
http://www.uu.se/news/news_item.php?typ=artikel&id=693
Neil
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