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Upgrade your math and physics!Math and physics tutoring for high school students in Calgary SW |
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Carl Gauss (1777-1855) is one of the greatest mathematicians of all times. He made significant contributions to almost every area of mathematics, physics, astronomy and statistics. Gauss showed amazing mathematical skill from an early age, and there are many stories which show how clever he could be.
Here is the story. One day his teacher who was a kind of evil, asked his class to add together all the numbers from 1 to 100, just to keep them busy. He was shocked when young Gauss, after a few seconds thought, wrote down the answer 5050. The teacher couldn't understand how his pupil had calculated the sum so quickly in his head, but the eight year old Gauss pointed out that the problem was actually quite simple.
Of course, the first move for most of the people would be to start from the beginning, and add 1 + 2 + 3 +.. and so on, in a soncecutive order, and that would a crasy long story.
Gauss had decided to add the numbers in pairs - the first and the last, the second and the second to last and so on. Note that 1+100=101, 2+99=101, 3+98=101, ..., every time the same number. So the total would be 50 lots of 101, which is 5050.
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