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There's a famous story about Gauss as a child (age 7 in some accounts) figuring out this trick when a teacher who probably wanted a break had the students add u
by not2b 4y ago
There's a famous story about Gauss as a child (age 7 in some accounts) figuring out this trick when a teacher who probably wanted a break had the students add up the numbers from 1 to 100. He saw that you could combine numbers from the ends: 1+100=101, 2+99=101, and there are 50 pairs, so the answer is 5050.
- croo 4y agoGauss was cheating since he was born! He fixed math errors in his father accountant stuff at age 3.(according to wikipedia) if thats not an unfair advantage i dont know what is ;)
- SilasX 4y agoThere's also the joke that John von Neumann was given this task and "cheated" by just instantly adding all the numbers in his head the naive way, without having to write anything down.
- jacobolus 4y agoThe traditional story is about calculating the distance a fly (or bird?) travels if it goes back and forth between two trains. https://jcdverha.home.xs4all.nl/scijokes/10.html#Neumann_4 https://jcdverha.home.xs4all.nl/scijokes/10.html#Neumann_4