It's quite possible that Gauss figured that out when he was young. I actually figured it out when I was 8. Being a young, anti-social kid, I tried adding numbers between 1 and as high as I could go, trying to find a pattern. The funny part was that I didn't know what variables were, although I did know fractions. My formula was something like, "Take a number, add one, divide by two, and then multiply it by half of the original number." It seemed very strange to me that that formula seemed to hold for any number I gave it. One day I even added all the numbers up to 20 in my hand to see if I got 210.

Anyway, one day I told my math teacher that I figured out this neat formula and then she introduced me to concepts like "variables" and "functions". :)

-Ted

In reply to Sum of numbers between 1 and N by tedv
in thread Recursion by lolindrath

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.