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Carl Friedrich Gauss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In elementary school his teacher, J.G. Buttner tried to occupy pupils by making them add up the integers from 1 to 100 (or 1 to 1000 or 3 7 11 15 19 23 27 ... or 81297 81495 81693 ... 100899 etc.). The young Gauss produced the correct answer within seconds by a flash of mathematical insight, to the astonishment of all. Gauss had realized that pairwise addition of terms from opposite ends of the list yielded identical intermediate sums: 1 100 = 101, 2 99 = 101, 3 98 = 101, and so on, for a total sum of 50 � 101 = 5050
Carl Friedrich Gauss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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