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Clever Carl and His Amazing Mathematical Tricks by Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss

About Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was born in Brunswick, Germany on 30th April 1777 he is recognized as being one of the greatest German Mathematicians of all time. During his lifetime he contributed to almost every field in mathematics, astronomy, statistics, and also in physics.

Gauss showed his skills in mathematics at an early age like many of the other great mathematicians and there are a lot of stories where we can see how clever and smart Gauss was in mathematics and other fields.

The most interesting story is a tale from Gauss’s childhood when he was in primary school and today I’m going to share that story with all of you which is going to be very compelling so let’s get started!

One day when Gauss was in his math class the teacher asked and gave his class to solve a mathematical problem which was to add all the numbers from “1 to 100”. The teacher thought that all the students would be occupied for quite a while solving this problem.

Every student in the class picked up a paper and started to solve the problem by adding all the numbers from 1 onwards.

The teacher was shocked because in a short time while the other students were trying to solve the problem Gauss submitted his answer which was “5050”.

That was shocking for his teacher as well as all the other students who were present in the class. And the interesting thing was that the answer was correct. How did Gauss do it so quickly is the big question?

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Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss Amazing Mathematical Tricks

The eight-year-old Gauss analyzed the mathematical problem differently; he said that the problem was quite easy to solve!

Gauss further said that he split the range of numbers 1 to 100 in two equal halves which is 1 to 50 and 51 to 100 and then he added the numbers in pairs of the first and the last number, the second and the second to the last number and so on.

Gauss added the first pair 1 + 50 which gave him 101, and he then added the second pair 2 + 99 again he got the same answer which was 101.

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This answer of 101 was valid for all the other pairs of a number and since there were a total of 50 pairs of numbers, the final total of all the pairs was “50 x 101 = 5050”. That’s how quickly Gauss was able to find the solution to this problem and he shared this with his teacher and all the students.

How about we see how the Gauss method works? Try it with the numbers from 1 to 10 and work out with these numbers. And how about from 1 to 50? Try and find the answer in the same way. the answers would be mentioned at the end of the article!

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It is remarkable to see a child who is still in an elementary school had discovered such a method by summing the sequence of numbers but none-then-less Gauss was no doubt a very bright student. While Gauss was in his twenties he made such discoveries that have shaped mathematics for its future.

And this was all about the story of Carl Friedrich Gauss and his ways of solving math so easily and quickly in this story in just one swift calculation he got the answer which is quite shocking and at the same time so interesting.

I hope you all enjoyed this fun tale from Gauss’s life. Thank you!

Answers: the total from 1 to 50 = 1275, and the total from 1 to 10 = 55. Let us know in the comments how many of you got the correct answer!

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And also you can try this trick with your friends and amaze them by solving the answers quickly.

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