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>There is an apocryphal story about Euler in elementary school solving all the math problems that the teacher gave to the class in a jiffy, so the teacher tells
by jplusequalt 1y ago
>There is an apocryphal story about Euler in elementary school solving all the math problems that the teacher gave to the class in a jiffy, so the teacher tells him to sum up the numbers to a thousand to get him to stop pestering for more. The expectation was that Euler would go through the numbers "imperatively", like C, summing them up. Instead, what Euler did was discover the summation formula and solved it "declaratively" like Haskell, in one go, as an equation.
I've heard this story be accounted to Gauss, not Euler.
- n4r9 1y agoYes, it's Gauss. In fact the technique is sometimes known as "Gaussian summation". The New Scientist has an article where the author chases down early references to the story: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/gausss-day-of-reckoning https://www.americanscientist.org/article/gausss-day-of-reck... The earliest reference is a biography of Gauss published a year after his death by a professor at Gauss' own university (Gottingen). The professor claims that the story was "often related in old age with amusement and relish" by Gauss. However, it describes the problem simply as "the summing of an arithmetic series", without mention of specific numbers (like 1-100). Also, it was posed to the entire classroom - presumably as a way to keep them busy for a couple of hours - rather than as an attempt to humiliate a precocious individual.
- lblume 1y agoYes. In Germany the formula n(n+1)/2 is actually called the Gaussian sum formula, or even the "small Gauss". [0] [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaußsche_Summenformel https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaußsche_Summenformel