Our Daily Story #5: The Prince of Math

Carl Friedrich Gauss is named the “Prince of Math” for his great contributions in almost every branch of Math.

As a child of a bricklayer father, Gauss used to follow his father to construction site to help counting the bricks. He learned how to stack the bricks in a pile of ten, add them up to obtain the total. If a pile has only 3, for example, he would top up 7 to make it 10 in a pile. Then 15 piles of 10 bricks would give a total of 150 bricks.

One day in school, his teacher wanted to occupy the 9-year-old children from talking in class, made them add the sum:
1 + 2 + 3+ ….+ 98 + 99 + 100 = ?

Gauss was the first child to submit the sum within few seconds = 5,050.

He used his brick piling technique: add

1 + 100…