Re: Stupid Arithmetic Tricks
On Sat, 30 Mar 2002, Erich Schubert wrote:
> > A little knowledge of series tells me to apply n*(n+1)/2 to sum an arithmetic
> > progression of common difference 1, starting at 1. This seems even quicker:
> > 100*101/2 becomes 5*101*10 becomes 505*10 = 5050.
>
> Yep, but you aren't teached these formulas when in primary school you
> just learned adding and summation... the teacher was said to have
> expected his pupils to need the whole lesson for doing this calculation.
> And Gauss was born 1777, and he really surprised his teacher by then,
> presenting the solution that fast ;)
>
> BTW: I just checked: gauss added 1+100, 2+99 etc. and got directly to
> the calculation 101*50 ;)
>
The astonishing thing is he did this when he was about 6 years old. Credit
should be given to the teacher for immediately recognizing something special
about the `peasant' boy in his class.
-walter
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