Free Food
Filed under Academics
Posted by Web Team, January 28, 2008
View all posts for January 2008
In the 1780s a provincial German schoolmaster gave his class the tedious assignment of summing the first 100 integers. The teacher’s aim was to keep the kids quiet for half an hour, but one young pupil almost immediately produced an answer: 1 + 2 + 3 + … + 98 + 99 + 100 = 5,050. The smart aleck was Carl Friedrich Gauss, who would go on to join the short list of candidates for greatest mathematician ever. Gauss was not a calculating prodigy who added up all those numbers in his head. He discovered a trick. DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT WAS?
Please join the Mathematics/Computer Science Liaison for free food and drinks in the Fens on Tuesday 1/26 @ 4pm as we discover the answer to this problem of the week. Anyone who knows the Gauss’s trick will get a prize.
