January 2023
Intermediate to advanced
248 pages
3h 45m
English
One of the world’s greatest mathematicians, Carl Friedrich Gauss, was born in Germany in 1777. It is said that when he was a young boy at school the teacher wanted to keep the class quiet, so he set this problem: ‘Add up all the numbers from one to one hundred.’ The schoolmaster thought that this task of adding 100 numbers would secure a long silence but, in a flash, the young Gauss raised his hand with the answer. He had found a quick and elegant way to solve the problem and what he did is an example of lateral thinking in mathematics. The obvious way to tackle the problem is to add 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 and so on. Gauss saw that if he added 1 + 100 he got 101, if he added 2 + 99 he got 101, if he added 3 + 98 he ...
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