There ’s a fable in the mathematics biotic community , about how a gifted youngster work out out a problem so brilliantly that his teacher grant him to study on his own . We ’ll tell you about the prodigy , and the story , and see if you may approximate his methods .
Carl Friedrich Gauss was a polymath whose lifetime spanned the late 18th and early nineteenth centuries . This was the time when math jump out from merely act through figures to finding innovative way to understand numbers and what they could do . Gauss helped make the startle , advancing the field of geometry , statistic , and figure hypothesis . ( Just as a bonus , he splash around in uranology and optics . )
He ’s still a legend in the mathematics community of interests , and in more way than one . When Gauss was still in elementary school , his instructor wanted some down metre and gave the course a time - filling assigning . He asked the course to give him the sum of all the numbers from one to one hundred . Within two minutes , Gauss produce his hand and announce he was done . The teacher asked Gauss how he had added a hundred numbers so quickly . Gauss said he had n’t . He ’d discovered a way to exploit the problem so it was simple-minded system of logic and times . The instructor put Gauss ’s workbook away , saying there was nothing more he could teach the kid .
Can you figure out how to bring up the numbers ? Let ’s take a look .
Gauss figured the trouble out by protest the urge to start at one end of the one to one hundred phone number job and work his way in . He started from both end , so he append 1 + 100 . Then he summate 2 + 99 . Then he added 3 + 98 . Notice something about all those aggregate ?
If you start from the ends and sum up in distich , every pair add up to 101 , from 1 + 100 to 50 + 51 . Since there have to be fifty of these pairs , all you have to do is multiply 101 by 50 to get 5050 . Then you get out of math grade forever and a day .
[ ViaClever Carl ]
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