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View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science
The formula you discovered is fine. There's nothing wrong with it. There's ways to generalize it. For example what happens if you try -6 or -12.
At the same time, the expression a^2 - b^2 arises frequently in math and science. So learning the trick to factoring it can be very helpful. While your formula may have uses, and it's interesting, it doesn't arise nearly as frequently. There's nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing here!