F Skip to main content

The fascinating story of a young Maths Prodigy

By Muaz Aqdas


Many of you may know about the formula for the addition of  'n' Natural Numbers which is (n)(n+1)/2.

And if you don't, then let me tell you about it. So if you want to add consecutive Natural Numbers, then you would use the formula (n)(n+1)/2 where n is the number up to which you want to do addition.

Let's take an example. I want to add all the natural numbers from 1 to 50, then here n would be 50, and the answer would be (50)(50+1)/2 which is 1275. 

Now it got a little boring, so allow me to tell you a great story behind this small equation, an equation's story, all of you will find intriguing.      


In the late 18th century there was math prodigy named Carl Friedrich Gauss who was faced with a tedious problem, the addition of numbers from 1 to 100.


But the fascinating thing was he figured a way around it. He made an equation to add natural numbers from 1 to any no. by the person's choice.


He saw a pattern, something humans are doing from the very beginning, well its a topic we would discuss someday, 

He saw that, during the addition of no. from 1 to 100, if we add first and the last no. we get a sum of 101 and on adding second and second last no. we again get a sum of 101 ..by seeing this, he got the pattern. 

The sum of corresponding numbers from the beginning and the end was the same, and that sum, which was -the number up to which we are adding(or you can say the last number) plus 1, was coming half the time of the last number.

 And thus the equation. (n)(n+1)/2. You can check the pattern by yourself. 

And it seems pretty easy for us because we know the equation now, but Carl was just a young student, and finding the pattern and getting to the end of his question's journey was really fascinating and admirable. So I thought it would be worth sharing with you all.

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. But I found this story of his, really amazing.


I hope you all liked the story. Share it with your friends and family, with those who have a mathematic background and with those too, who don't. 

And share your views in the comment section below.

Cause the sky is the only limit. Embrace yourself. 

You can do anything if you have a strong will for doing it.


And remember there is always a pattern, you just need to find it. 



source: NCTM

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pegasus Report

By Sanjay Ram Pegasus Report A report that wasn’t from a single journalist or a single company a total of 17 media companies 80 journalists across the world with different languages collaborated with this report. We could estimate how big this issue is! There have been many malware attacks in the past in different ways such as sending it through opening links or messages, but spyware like Pegasus is a zero-click attack, where the user cannot escape from this virus if it’s injected into the smartphone.  Pegasus is a Greek mythological creature, A horse that has wings. In Greek mythology, it’s believed that Pegasus helped defeat evil and has been a symbol of inspiration. Pegasus is believed to have been immortal such a name is given to spyware is because of the traits it has. Pegasus spyware made headlines in July 2021 where approximately 50 k phone numbers worldwide were suspected to have been hacked which mainly consisted of politicians, journalists, activists, bureaucrats, and eve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Discord

 By Sanjay Ram Discord is a group-chatting platform originally built for gamers. Discord is divided into servers, each of which has its members, rules, and channels. Discord has the feature to voice and video chat, as well as Livestream games – this has been the most attractive point as people just come to enjoy, playing games with friends. At a basic level, Discord is built to allow members to message each other. Each community is called a "server”. Category: A category in the server separates the different uses for different functions performed, for example- A category Media is created for different channels. A category can be separated for voice and text channels.   Servers are filled with text channels -where you can type to talk to other people, give commands to bots and perform several functions with required inputs. Voice channels where you can voice-chat with your friends, the reason why discord has become so popular is that it keeps the game volume separately from peo...
4 comments
Read more

CHESS

 by Sanjay Ram Chess is a game of strategy and tactics, it was created in India, it's a miniature of war. It is played on a square chessboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king, whereby the king is under a check and there is no way for it to escape.  Chess pieces are divided into two different coloured sets which are 'white' and 'black'. Each player has 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns. The game is played on a square board of eight rows (called ranks) and eight columns (called files).  CHESSPIECES : Pawn : A Pawn moves forward exactly one square but in the beginning, it can move two, toward the opponent's side of the board. The pawn captures pieces diagonally. If the pawn reaches a square on the last rank of the opponent, it is promoted to a queen, rook, bishop, or knight.  KNIGHT : A Knight moves two squares forward and one in le...
9 comments
Read more